Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease | Hacker News Reader

Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease

ansuz.sooke.bc.ca

81 pointsdsr_73 comments

This article also hints at one of the reasons why humans chafe at economic inequality, and a rising tide lifting all boats is not enough to produce utopia: there are some resources - desirable reproductive partners, status, land (esp. near others of high status) - which do not become more widely available as prosperity increases. The pursuit of these goods can even become more immiserating in a society with large differences in relative status, as the coveted attention of others flocks to global superstars rather than local stars. The author shows that these approximately zero-sum goods can be largely reduced to "attention".

And if we assume attention is valuable, while everything else is valueless, we've been pretty good at destroying what's valuable for what's valueless in the past century.

Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with those close to us.

Some of us pour our attention into hour long commutes where we spend our utmost effort not to give attention to anyone near us - it might make them uncomfortable.

Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities, porn stars even.

We spend our time fine-tuning our processes to be as "efficient" as possible, from the queue in the supermarket, to the queue in the fast food restaurant, to reduce our shopkeepers and waiters to mere actors following a script efficiently, and in some cases, completely replace them with machines.

We make our workplace a place where colleagues gather for majority of their lives, but make it difficult to form enduring long term friendships.

We spend lots of time worrying about economic inequality but much less time about attention inequality. The only relevant policy we do have is subsidised psychologic care.

It's inhumane to deny human food, that's why we provide welfare. It's inhumane to neglect a child's need for parental love, which is why we place orphans in foster homes (not perfect). And what about adults, what do we do about attention inequality in terms of family, friendship, and sexual partners? We just sort of leave it up to them to figure it out, and then when we read about suicides in the paper, we write a comment "if you feel this way please seek help immediately".

This is a summary of what I find wrong about modern society, and I have no solution besides enjoying the giving of time to those close to me when they ask for it.

We've become a lot more efficient trading away our attention for physical goods that don't really matter to us except to trade in a zero sum game for more attention.

I'm excited to see the phrase "attention inequality". I've had similar thoughts for a few years and suspect that's a fertile line of inquiry.

I haven't gotten far enough along in thinking about it to say anything very clear, but I think the relationship between our attitudes about wealth inequality vs attention inequality is important and telling.

To many who don't think deeply, wealth inequality is terrible while attention inequality is natural and no big deal.

The two kinds of inequality cause each other, which is also interesting. But mostly I'm interested in how our attitudes about one kind can or cannot, must or must not, apply to the other.

EDIT: To circle back to your point, I disagree that attention can be "destroyed". I prefer to say that attention can never be destroyed, only shifted from one thing to another. So if you are ignoring your family and playing video games, you have not destroyed your attention, you have instead shifted it to the video game (and its creators).

True, everyone has 24 hours a day, though what I really mean is the utility of that attention can be destroyed - the utility of 10 hours of your attention for the video game creator is measured in tens of dollars but could be priceless to your children.

And I'm happy you are excited to see this phrase. :-)

> Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with those close to us.

> Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities, porn stars even.

I think you've got this backwards. Those technologies are ways for the people who have the most attention to give out more attention than they could ever possibly do in person. They're precisely what makes the attention economy positive-sum.

You're saying that the video game or the celebrity is giving attention to the person watching it? Either I don't understand your comment, or you are the one who has it backwards...

Yes. Not perfectly, of course, but it gives them the experience of having attention paid to them.

I can see how that's true in MMORPG's, but what about single player games? You could argue they give the temporary feeling of receiving attention, but it goes away when we stop partaking in that activity and we don't receive actual benefits of receiving attention - it was smoke and mirrors.

I think it's the same experience. There's a reason these single-player games usually cast you in the role of someone important, pivotal even.

What are those "actual benefits" that players miss out on?

When you spend an hour with your child, the child matures by another hour worth of your attention. The relationship also becomes an hour stronger, plus you gain memories associated with the hour. With single player games there is only the memory, no relationship building and no nurturing provided. Good observation about most games make us someone important.

It's certainly possible to learn and mature from one's experience in single-player gaming. And many games give the experience of developing a relationship.

A game can give the illusion of a relationship, but it is not a real relationship with another human being. The evolutionary reasons why we need relationships are because having other humans care about us helps us live better lives. A game, which does not care about you, may partially satisfy that evolved need but cannot provide any of the real-world benefits of an actual relationship with an actual person who actually cares about you.

You're begging the question. Games already fill human needs - that's why we play them - and things like entertainment are no less real-world than physical objects. I believe Love Plus already e.g. buys players gifts (based on their wishlists)? A game won't yet do things like taking care of you if you're sick, sure, but I suspect that's only a matter of time.

You think I am begging the question because you think that

> things like entertainment are no less real-world than physical objects.

but this is false.

A relationship in the real world with a human being is not the same thing as a relationship with an AI that you interact with through a screen. It is less real. Are you still experiencing feeling? Yes. Are you communicating? Yes. Is it real? Yes, of course it is real, just like my iPhone is real, servers in a datacenter somewhere are real, and the medium is real even though it is a different medium. Nonetheless, it is less real because it is not a human being.

From an evolutionary perspective, we enjoy certain things (type A) because they lead to other things (type B) that make our survival and reproduction more likely. This is what the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy is about. When a machine process gives you the type A things but of course cannot ever give you the type B benefits that actually created those evolutionary pressures, then you are on some level being fooled. When I say "less real" this is what I am talking about.

The fact that you point out that a game won't take care of you while you are sick shows me that you get my point.

Email in my profile if you want to take the discussion further. It's getting a bit off-topic here but I am interested in the topic, and yes, in the real, human conversation we are having. ;-)

We're a long way off from a system where a rising tide would lift all boats.

But that also illustrates why economic inequality is getting blamed unfairly. Reducing inequality will not produce more hot women or flats in Manhattan/SF. The same number of people will get hot women, it's just that more women will go for dangerous unemployable bad boys and fewer will go for wealthy investment bankers or techies.

This is true if you assume strict monogamy, of both housing and mates. When inequality becomes very great, the very wealthy can purchase a greater share of the available housing (see ghost flats in London and Vancouver) and monopolize the reproductive years of a greater number of mates (usually women). To give a very rough example - when inequality is within a bridgeable margin (say an order of magnitude), a young woman may decide to marry the nice young doctor/coder rather than chase the fabulously wealthy scion. Presumably the promise of high spousal and parental investment on the part of the less-wealthy potential mate compensates for the reduced immediate access to material resources. If inequality becomes very large, it may be rational for that same woman to roll the dice on joining the throng chasing the scion. Where polygamy is normal, this is often what we observe. The case for housing is less clear - I would be interested to know whether there was a time when desirable housing was more normally distributed, although I have heard this was the case for white Americans in midcentury CA.

When inequality becomes very great, the proportion of very wealthy goes down far faster than their ability to consume.

I'm sure Richard Branson has a soft harem (to borrow the pickup-artist "soft polygamy" terminology). If he has a new girl every day (I'm half his age and I doubt I could physically pull that off) that's still only 365/year. As inequality goes up there are far fewer Richard Bransons as a proportion of the population.

I'm just middle class, and I've often had 2-4 women in my soft harem at any one time. That means 100 guys like me - with no particular excess of money - can easily have the same effect as Branson would.

I did some calculations a while back. If all the high net wealth people in NYC have 10 houses each, they'll have the same effect on housing as building one more NYU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022235#12022920

Our shortage of housing and attractive women is caused by an increasing middle class competing for them, and an inability/unwillingness (depending on how you characterize exclusionary zoning and an unwillingness to put down the fork) to increase the supply.

I did some somewhat similar calculations for my country. What you say is true and doesn't even just apply to the super-rich. The amount of people who have 10 or more times higher income than average is around 1 in 100 people in my country.

So the frequency drops by 2 orders of magnitude as income ratio grows by 1 order of magnitude.

In the US it's perhaps not 1:100, but it's also unlikely to be anywhere near 1:10.

So yes, the average person "suffers" from competition from people who are near their general level of income way more than from competition from rich people.

I'd like to point out - the increased participation of people in "soft harems" reduce the number of mates available in monogamy relationships. The resource "Exclusivity * attention" (what a lot of people value) is being destroyed by the increasing number of people engaging in polygamy; the number of monogamous mates available is reduced in the sense that it makes it harder for monogamous mates to find each other in a polygamous world. And inequality is increased - "superstars" have 365 mates instead of just 1.

I don't think you understood the point, I am not arguing against that. I am arguing that these "superstars" are not important because they are so rare compared to the increased number of partners they can have. They are, as a group, less competition for an average person than middle class people who mostly have from zero to a small number of partners but are very numerous.

Ok. Good point.

In a world where women can support themselves, being rich is just one factor of being attractive to women. There are plenty of guys who are very successful with women despite not being rich, because it is not a requirement that they be able to support them. So in theory, if you removed wealth inequality, certain individuals would just dominate romantic life for other reasons.

However, your argument is flawed in other ways.

There isn't a strict limit after which women will marry a guy for money (what you call a bridgeable margin - it doesn't exist). Obviously this is gradual and different for each woman. So the probability that a randomly selected woman would marry a guy for his money grows with his income.

In this situation, the order of magnitude of inequality becomes irrelevant because the two orders of magnitude richer than average guy will be an order of magnitude rarer than the one order of magnitude richer than average guy (in the worst possible case, in reality they will be even rarer). So even though the extremely rich guy can do "more damage" to the rest of society by hogging something, there are less of them, so in total they hog the same amount. So this order of magnitude doesn't actually make a difference.

These are great points, and I regret that I used an example that inadvertently framed the discussion around "women marrying for money"- In fact I believe that women have a surprisingly catholic breadth of mate choice criteria, and the data available on reproductive variability in modern societies seem to bear this out. As the preceding comments note, the existence of a Zipf-distributed hyper-elite is not necessarily a big problem for certain categories of goods. I am actually more interested in the effects of the collapse of alternative status hierarchies and how this affects different status 'tournaments'. Global competitions seem to converge on a single figure of merit, and I wonder whether jagged multimodal distributions on a single variable produce different 'competitions' than normal distributions or multivariate distributions. I would also note that an individual or group can affect a resource competition without directly consuming the resource itself.

These goods are not even zero-sum, they're negative sum! This is one of the reasons large inequality is inefficient: larger and larger amounts of our production go to competition over these scarce goods without actually increasing the amount of them available to go around.

The whole chicken / beef thing has been misunderstood by the author - chicken was never the expensive alternative to beef. The author seems to have been masively misled by the (false) quote of Hoover "a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage". Hoover never said this. My best reading of the history seems to be:

16th century: (Henry IV) "If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in my realm will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday!"

1928: (Hoover) "The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage."

1928: (Republican campaign flyer) Title "A Chicken for Every Pot", text includes "Republican properity has... put the proverbial 'chicken in every pot'. And a car in every backyard, to boot."

It's clear that in 1928 chicken wasn't an the indicator of wealth that the author things; it was (as the flyer says) proverbial.

According to the charts in The Rise and Fall of American Growth we've gone from eating 3 times as much beef as chicken in 1800 to eating 60% more chicken than beef. This[1] shows that since 1960 beef has gone up in price by a factor of 2 relative to chicken. So all the evidence I could find supports the author's conclusion even if I don't have any data on relative meat prices going back to 1900 or so. If you've got some data that actually contradicts the authors claim about food prices I'd love to see it but given the congruency I found I'm willing to accept their claim.

[1]http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/sta...

For reference, the 'smell test' that lead to me thinking twice about this is the energy cost. Small animals don't have to live as long to reach full size, so you don't need to spend as much energy (food) keeping the existing mass of the animal alive while it's growing new mass. That's why (very roughly) the cost of common farmed meat is normally chicken -> pork -> beef.

It seems the main reason chicken was expensive was that it was seasonal and labor-intensive. Someone on reddit writes:

> Chicken, and eggs, were until the mid-20th century, a seasonal food. Chicken more than a year old is very tough, requiring hours of roasting or boiling to get a fairly tasteless end result. Most chickens lay their eggs in the spring and summer, petering out over the year. Old recipe books will have different instructions for "December" versus "April" eggs, given the quality of the yolks, which didn't used to be the uniformly pale color that industrial eggs look like now. So when the eggs would hatch, the young males would be culled and eaten right away by households, but the variety of cuts were few and the market to sell chickens incidental. Let's fast forward to the twentieth century. Unlike cows and pigs, who are irregular but large, chickens resisted the assembly line innovations of industrial production because they were irregular and small, which means they needed lots and lots of labor to process them.

(https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_d...)

The fact that the proverb was still in use seems to indicate that chicken was still percieved as a luxury good at this time? Today nobody says "a chicken in every pot", presumably because chicken is cheap.

I googled a bit and found "Management of Young Chicks" by P.H. Jacobs, from 1888, which says[1] "A half-pound chick sells at $1.50 per pound ... A three-quarter chcik sells at $1 per pound. ... A 1.5 pound chick sells at 50 cents per pound ... A pound chick sells at 75 cents."

Meanwhile the price of round steak in 1890 was apparently 12.3 cents/pound.[2] So at least at this point, chicken seems to have been more expensive than beef.

By the 1930s the prices of beef and chicken seems to have been about equal [3,4]. This makes sense, because apparently the 1920s was the breakthrough time in the chicken industry, seeing both the discovery of Vitamin D (allowing keeping chickens in confinement all year, and letting chickens thrive during winter), and also the first broilers (chickens bread specifically for meat rather than egg production). [5]

So the time when the Hoover campaign made the slogan about "a chicken in every pot" also seems to be just about the time when chicken prices had started to come down and making that feasible. But people were still eating much less chicken than pork or beef [6]; presumably people had still not changed their perception of chicken into an everyday food.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=XitDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA24&lpg=P...

[2] http://www.library.yale.edu/thecitycourse/Census_PDFs/USA_Hi...

[3] https://books.google.ca/books?redir_esc=y&id=jzfJ6tNmTvsC&q=...

[4] http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/30sfood.html

[5] http://www.thehappychickencoop.com/a-history-of-chickens/

[6] http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/09/beef-or-chicken-a-look-at...

"As the only thing that can be expensive in the final Strong Heaven, attention predictably gets more expensive in a culture that moves more and more toward general post-scarcity. "

So the world's first profession would also be its last. How fitting.

The key sentence, for me:

"The pattern of Cost Disease seems to be related to things that inextricably require the unsubstitutable labour and attention not just of human beings but of human beings somehow comparable to the buyer."

On a related note, you may have heard that Obama managed to push out the date that Medicare would run out of money by 11 years through the Affordable Care Act. He did this by declaring that henceforth, one of this things that requires the unsubstitutable labour and attention of human beings somehow comparable to the buyer - consultations with doctors - would henceforth go down in price at the same rate everything else. I have my doubts as to whether this is actually possible to do by decree.

It doesn't explain the insane cost increases in the US though, if you follow the links on Cost Disease in the OP, there are sources that show only minor increases in salaries (the cost of labor) http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

It also doesn't explain that only the US has these insane cost increases. It all comes down to the weird political and regulatory climate in the US. You can't draw any conclusions on the broader human condition based on such an outlier country.

It's often cited that in Europe the sticker prices of both healthcare and education are lower. However that's because most of it is being subsidized by the state; it would be interesting to see whether the total societal costs are similarly rising everywhere for a comparable education or comparable healthcare (e.g. ER visit for broken arm).

No, the figures Scott cited include state subsidies. It's indicative that Britain, spending the same amount of money divided by total population, can provide healthcare to everyone for the same amount of money the US spends on Medicaid and Medicare for providing it for just the old and poor.

The "sticker price" in Europe is often zero. I don't think I've seen any international comparisons that don't include all the state costs.

That said there are knock-on effects that aren't always well-explained - if higher education is free, doctors won't have student loans to pay off meaning they end up with lower salaries.

I feel like a nontrivial root cause of cost disease is USian land use restrictions that make real estate pathologically expensive. The devastating effects of bad zoning policies end up severely driving the cost of real estate -- and real estate prices, both for housing and business/industry, end up affecting a whole lot of operational expenses for both employees and corporations (which then in turn affects prices).

(It's not just simply "regulatory burden" in general (except maybe healthcare) as explained in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-... -- there's hella many industries and services and goods affected by cost disease, and the regulatory burdens too much to be a root cause -- real estate / housing costs is a more likely common cause)

> USian

Is this a regional thing (Assuming it's a synonym for American. Google tries to correct me to Usain Bolt, then brings up a page of Usian Bolt typos.)

USian is a term adopted by English speakers who wish to more clearly distinguish between things related to the United States (the political entity), and things related to the Americas (the geographical entity(ies)). Motivations can range from a desire for precision in speech to a recognition that claiming the term "America" for one country, when in fact it is two continents with dozens of countries, isn't terribly considerate. People from Canada, Mexico, and Chile can all legitimately say they are "American", just like both Germans and Spaniards are "European", but using the term extensively to mean "people or matters related to the US" makes this less viable.

Note that in Spanish the term Estadounidense (note the similarity to "Estados Unidos") exists, though I don't know how much it's used.

Of course, it's an uphill battle, especially when you consider that the official name for Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

I sort of like Frank Lloyd Wright's coinage of Usonian which makes the same distinction but is much nicer to say.

I'm not really sure I see the point. If you want to refer to the two continents, you can say "The Americas".

The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause one to assume it's from or of the US.

I think that's a perfectly reasonable assumption, since it's by far the most common usage of the term. If someone uses the term "American" to mean "person from the Americas" they are being needlessly obtuse.

And I don't think this usage is particularly "inconsiderate", it's just a quirk of language.

> The point is that saying someone or something is "American" shouldn't cause one to assume it's from or of the US.

That's seems like it's a pretty silly sentiment, since in common English speech that's exactly what 'American' implies.

As you yourself note, USian could just as easily refer to someone from the United States of Mexico.

I personally think it'd be salutary for our republic if my fellow Americans would refer to themselves as New Yorkers, Californians, Georgians, Texans &c. rather than as Americans (just as Germans, French, Dutch, Danish refer to themselves), but that's a different discussion altogether.

I actually prefer to call myself Californian in most contexts. I also think the word "state" is diluted by the US.

Anyway, I'm not really advocating for one side or the other. In common usage "American" definitely relates to the US most of the time.

I can understand the annoyance of people from other American countries, though. Surely Nigerians, Eritreans, etc. would have a reason to be frustrated if "African" came to refer particularly to "South Africa" and not to the continent.

> Of course, it's an uphill battle, especially when you consider that the official name for Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

I think in Mexico they call Americans norteamericanos — but of course both they & Canadians are North Americans.

I don't think there's any reason not to call Americans Americans.

The title of the blog is "people before ..." And the writer doesn't understand the social signaling of clothing? Like, at all?

First, clothing is really personal, and funding a second skin that "suits me" and "fits me" requires much wider selection than a rack of time socks can supply.

Second, anyone with a social job that depends on status, or who is in the marriage/mate market, or who works in a job that may wear on clothing but still needs to be presentable, will need more than a few hundred dollars a year for clothing budget.

"The cost disease of the service sector" is a well known economic theory (I leaned it in economics 101 in the '90s) and the real insight should probably be that, as we get better at making stuff, the scarce resource becomes educated human time, but we are still locked in a value model that mainly measures "stuff."

Once robots make all the stuff for basically free, we have to totally change how our society operates its economy. That's fairly close in time, yet nobody is really even making up the words we'll use to talk about the issue yet.

The article mentions a few:

Post-Scarcity and Attention Economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

Thank flying spaghetti monster I work in a profession where you can get by on free conference t-shirts and a couple new pairs of jeans a year.

Why do you need new pairs of jeans every year? I don't think I've ever had to discard jeans except from growing out of them. They are made of tough material.

Haha. Hilarious example of how no matter how much anyone tries to one up someone on anything someone else will come along and do the same to them.

It's all a matter of degrees. When I was young and in India I could buy jeans and shirts straight from Coimbatore or Dhaka at costs you would find impossible.

Why do I need the clothes I wear now? I don't. I like them. I want them. I don't need them.

Maybe you're buying better jeans than I am. After about a year mine develop holes in the seat, particularly around the pockets. Sometimes they get torn before that, if I get wet and then get them caught on something.

Tears are easily stitched or patched. Pockets coming apart is trickier; restitching over a patch of strong material can work, but only for a while, and more of the fabric disintegrates every time they come apart again.

And, no, you needn't, and it is inarguably more efficient of time just to buy a new pair. But it can be a pleasant hobby, and I think that as much as anything proves the original article's point.

Well, I think the point he is making (although he didn't say it explicitly), is that buying clothing is buying attention.

So you're pretty much in agreement.

Health care is a pretty simple one to explain. In addition to the fact that technology doesn't bring massive productivity increases to a field that requires human-to-human interaction, the fact is that health care today is a much much more extensive undertaking than it was 50 years ago. We have much better drugs, much better treatments, and much better diagnosing tools. There's also the paradox that better health care means longer lifespans which means greater health care expenses. When chronic conditions can be managed instead of quickly becoming terminal, that's a win, but it also means that the health care costs for that human go way way up. There's corruption, rent-seeking, patent abuse and monopoly effects, too, of course, not to mention a balkanized health insurance market. But the basic fact is that we get a lot more from health care industry than we ever did in the past, so you'd expect that that portion of the economy would be much bigger than it ever was.

Plus a large portion of the public in America doesn't pay for healthcare directly (they either get employer-based health insurance or declare bankruptcy) so it distorts incentives while retaining the profit motive. Furthermore American society is seemingly setup to avoid exercise and healthy foods at any cost.

The Japanese are just as wealthy, older, and they smoke more, but they have better health outcomes and they spend almost a third per capita on healthcare. Chile spends about a ninth on healthcare and their average life expectancy is a full year more than the USA.

On top of all of this is the fact that people can get into debt at 1% interest. Hard to be cost-conscious when dear old gran needs a $20k (only $50 per month!) treatment to live another three months. Same thing happened to education.

Key part about that distortion is that it hides the rent seeking.

The rent seeking of drug companies and over-regulation?

Forgive me, I'm unclear how we went from insurance company malfeasance to regulatory capture by Big Pharma.

Does anyone know a writer 50 years ago predicting the cost disease in U.S. healthcare? If not, "you'd expect" seems like hindsight. The closest I can think of is science fiction stories about a corporation monopolizing a genuine immortality treatment, which is both infinitely beyond 2017 medicine and just one of many sf scenarios.

Interesting theory about corporation style bureaucracy taking over public (governmental) functions, leading to increased costs, among other side effects:

"The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"

by David Graeber

http://amzn.to/2mi169U

Same economist who wrote Debt.

First theory for why public education has gotten so nutty. Like requiring K-12 teachers to have masters degrees and ongoing training (out of pocket) while paying them peanuts.

Frankly, this book blew my mind.

So why, in this view, did U.S. life expectancy decline recently? http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/08/50466760...

Alright, but many other nations get as much from healthcare as the USA does, while paying much less for it. Examples: western Europe, Canada, Japan.

I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of a shift of the theory of value from subjective to objective: considering things like education in terms of objective value, you can just total up their cost in hours of people's lives, rather than trying to consider them purchased on a market.

Or, if you prefer, fixing the basis for pricing on the effort involved rather than the exchange value.

> Yes, that's Haruhi Suzumiya. But it's also someone in a much older franchise you might have heard of.

Let's not be coy. Does the author mean God here? Or something else?

Meta comment: "bc.ca" is one of those along with "co.uk", "co.jp", etc. where anyone can register a third-level domain underneath it. The domain for this submission really should be sooke.bc.ca

The HN code should import and use the Public Suffix List or a library that can make use of it.

https://publicsuffix.org/learn/

Yes. I suggested it two years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911044

canadian domains used to require you to register '(your-name).(city).(province).ca' unless you could prove you operated in more than one city, or in more than one province. sooke is a municipality, so in a perfect world, the domain for this submission should be ansuz.sooke.bc.ca.

There exist some SF set in Strong Heaven, but it's mostly written in Russian :)

Here's a bit that is not: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

I found it not wholly unsatisfactory, although a bit rough in spots - on the other hand, it both prefigures and subverts the Rapture of the Nerds avant la lettre, so I'd be willing to excuse quite a bit more than is actually required. Definitely worthwhile, especially if you also found the whole "Singularity" thing grating.

There's some that was written in Scotland too.

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