Chathamization

With the right tax structures, it would end up focusing on giving money to lower income individuals. You have an increased progressive taxation structure such that for upper-middle income people the UBI is a wash (IE, someone making $100,000 a year is getting and additional $12,000 from UBI but paying $12,000 more than they would have before).

The reason why UBI works well is because it's a cash handout (like the other person said, you're not specifying the needs of the individual), it's a universal and not means tested program (you don't have to go through a bureaucratic maze every time you become eligible), and it's instantaneous for people who have sudden changes in fortune (IE, the income stream is already set up).

That's been my experience overseas as well. In fact, I feel that the service in the U.S. is generally worse than the service I get overseas. For instance, it's not uncommon for it to take half an hour between deciding to get the check and finishing the transaction (I've taken to asking for a check mid-meal now). You also get waiters who are unhappy if you don't order enough or don't order alcohol, as well as a territorial nature when it comes to tables that can lead to inefficiencies.

So in addition to worse service, you get stick with the unnecessary burden of having to calculate a tip at the end instead of simply getting a bill and paying for it. If you're paying cash it can be difficult to end up with the exact change you need to pay the tip you want, and if you're splitting the bill it can lead to frustrations when different people want to tip different amounts (or some people calculate the tip wrong).

> But it would be relatively easy to visit a whole bunch of polling stations

That would make it harder. If you try it for one vote in one place there's a decent chance you might get away with it. You have to hope that the person isn't voting at the same time you are, that the poll workers don't recognize the person, that others voting there don't, etc. It's quite possible you'll get caught, considering these are local areas, but there's enough people that you might get away with it once. But try it 10-20 times, and the likelihood that you're going to get caught increases a lot. And even trying it 10-20 times doesn't mean 10-20 votes, since if the person already voted you'll get a provisional ballot.

So even trying to get a handful of extra votes is extremely risky. If you tried to organize a dozen people to do the same, the chance you're going to get caught goes up massively - both because of the possibility of getting caught in the polling place mentioned before, and the fact that if you try to organize a group like that there's a good chance something will leak out/someone will tell people.

You're in a situation where it's very likely to be caught and, even in the off chance that you succeeded, you wouldn't even be creating enough votes to impact the vast majority of elections. This is why in person voter fraud is so rare.

I just checked out Bubblegum Crisis (1987), and that also has multiple shots with crazy power lines in the background. For instance, 11:38 here:

https://youtu.be/JlFGbBPQGLo?t=698

This is an important point; making a drug illegal can sometimes lead to people seeking out more dangerous drugs that are legal to use instead. Bath salts (the drugs, not actual bath salts) are a good example - a large part of their popularity they weren't illegal at the federal level until 2012.

One of the problems too is that it makes it more difficult to distinguish who is actually interested in being a close friend with you and who is only interested in being a casual relationship.

To give just one example - in the past, you might have gotten birthday e-mail from a few people. You would have a sense that these people thought about you enough to pay attention to your birthday and contact you. Likewise, if you cared about someone enough, you could do the same and signal that you thought of them highly as a friend.

But now you have Facebook asking everyone your connected with to leave a birthday message on your birthday. I've seen people who's Facebook accounts seem to clearly be dead, but they keep getting the same dozen birthday greetings each year from the same people who actually don't care enough about the person to notice they're no longer on.

And since the Facebook birthday seems to be the way a lot of people think about their friend's birthdays these days, not participating means that you're going to get much fewer birthday greetings than you would have in the pre-Facebook days.

Again, this is just one example, but I think it does a decent job of illustrating how Facebook has supplanted a lot of more substantive communication and replaced it with copious amounts of junk food communication.

I know of some people who go to church even though they don't believe, and it seems to work for them. For a lot of people, though, that becomes extremely uncomfortable. You say you don't have to lie to people, and maybe that's the case, but I suppose it depends on one's definition of a lie.

Given a prayer to a god one doesn't believe in feels dishonest for some, as does nodding along and letting people assume you share their beliefs when you don't. The foundation for church is supposed to be a shared theological belief, so it's not too difficult to understand why some might be uncomfortable joining when they know that they don't share the belief and have to go through certain motions to conceal this fact from their brethren.

It would be nice to see people work on some alternatives to traditional churches. We tried creating a scientific pantheism[1] group a while ago and there was a decent amount of interest, but at some point it became clear that continuing it really required more time than any of us was able to put in. We might try something like that again some day; I definitely think there's a lot of untapped potential out there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_pantheism

Though even in the case of CISA, you have far more Republicans than Democrats voting in favor of it and far more Democrats than Republicans voting against it.

I think this is a good point. People are social animals, and most of us need a community, but much of that community today is deeply tied into this modern distraction society. For instance, you mentioned quitting tobacco - I bet this is much, much harder to do in the places and times where smoking is/was an important social activity. It's not only that these distractions are everywhere, but that avoiding them can lead to some degree of isolation.

It would be nice to find some sort of community that's pushing back against these things. It's hard to do alone - for instance, when I tried going back to writing long e-mail to friends instead of merely liking Facebook posts, I got little response. People had moved on, and weren't interested in going back.

> I'm a total outsider to this (being European and all that), but could lack of vote-created change be due to lack of serious candidates who are not the "usual suspects"?

I doubt it, mostly because when good candidates run you still see pretty low turnout and the good candidates often lose (and with downballot races, even the few people who bothered to vote have a hard time remembering who they voted for, let alone why). And this kind of apathy is everywhere; it's not uncommon to see some nationally famous political writers who are extremely ignorant about major local elections and don't even seem to care about them. And when it leads to bad outcomes, many people see that as an excuse for even more apathy: "See? We don't have a choice, this is an oligarchy, it's impossible to change things by voting, why bother."

I think you have a decent point about fewer elected offices, but it's hard to make a blanket statement because it's very situational since elected offices vary a lot by state. The political parties themselves could also benefit from fewer elected officials, for what it's worth.

> New York has low turnout because it has a set of laws that serve to disenfranchise voters in ways that other states could only ever dream of. (Yes, people technically have the right to vote, but because of a set of laws which I've described elsewhere, there's no way for them to use these votes to hold their elected officials accountable, like there is in other states).

The only laws I've seen you describe elsewhere in this thread is the delay in New York if you want to switch parties (was 6 months in 2016, now I believe it's up to ~11 months) and the fusion voting system. Neither of these prevents Democrats from voting in the Democratic primary, so I'm not sure which ones your talking about.

I'm not sure why you think contested races only happen once a decade. The year before the gubernatorial race, there was, (for example) a pretty well contested NYC mayoral race and NYC comptroller race. There have been plenty of contested races in the NY senate, (some connected to the IDC drama, like Tony Avella beating John Liu 6,813 to 6,245 with ~13% turnout) as well as the assembly and downballot races.

So, I brought up Cuomo's election in 2014 - let's look at that example. Teachout was running a reformist campaign against Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary (and Credico was running as well). Only 594,287 people bothered showing up to vote. Of those showing up to vote, 361,380 voted for Cuomo[1]. In November 2015, there were 5,778,460 registered Democrats in New York[2].

So in 2014, after a fairly serious issue involving Cuomo getting rid of an anti-corruption panel because it was investigating corruption connected to him, only 4% of registered Democrats - four percent! - bothered to show up and vote for someone other than him in the primaries. And this was for governor! Almost 90% of registered Democrats didn't vote at all - they didn't care one way or the other who would be governor. Down ballot races usually get even less attention.

Naturally, I'm not saying that there isn't anyone who cares and acts accordingly. But what I am saying is that the amount of people who care and act accordingly are a minority, and in many cases, a very small minority.

[1] http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/elections/2014/Primary/20... [2] https://nypost.com/2016/04/06/ny-voter-registration-barely-i...

> This leaves us with no levers of power over government decisions.

I'm not sure I understand this. Yes, the hand-picked successor will be able to fulfill the rest of the term, but then he's up for re-election. If people were actually outraged about this, they could vote him out the next time there's an election (just like they could have voted out the predecessor that set this process in motion). If people were really upset about corruption, they could have voted Cuomo out for killing the anti-corruption panel when it started to look in to corruption connected to him (IIRC, this happened just a few months before the 2014 primary).

It's hard for me to believe that these things really bother people when they keep voting back in the people who are doing them.

It's not just funding transportation though, it's also the oversight of projects. Few people take transportation funding into account when they vote; almost no one seems to take transportation oversight into account.

I think also looking at it simply as a party problem hurts things, because there can be a lot of difference within the party, but people tend to overlook these things (and again, not just in terms of the amount of money that's spent, but also in terms of how it's spent).

Do people in London and Toronto care enough to pressure their leaders about this? In my experience it's hard to find people in the U.S. who even bother to pay attention to who has oversight when it comes to transportation (and not just transportation, this is true for a lot of local issues).

Fortran's older and Lisp is as old (it can be argued about whether COBOL or Lisp are older). Fortran and Lisp seem to have held up much better. ALGOL is another contemporary, and arguably the one that has the biggest impact on popular languages.

After two decades they're still struggling to create a viable Golden Rice product.[1] At the same time, some areas have seen a large drop in vitamin A deficiencies. One has to wonder if Golden Rice is actually a good way to solve this problem.

[1] https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...

> So surely you're just as angry about the Democrats deregulating the telecoms in 1996 and allowing companies to own entire vertical chains.

Looks like that was a bi-partisan effort, but with more Democrats opposing it than Republicans. Senators who voted for the act: 51 Republicans, 30 Democrats. Senators opposed: 2 Republicans, 16 Democrats (one Republican senator didn't vote).[1]

House members who voted for the act: 236 Republicans, 178 Democrats. House members opposed: 0 Republicans, 15 Democrats (four Democratic house members didn't vote).[2]

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1995/s268 [2] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1996/h25

> But please don't pretend the Dems are a whole lot better on most of these issues... I really hope our generation can work together and do something about this failing two-party system.

Paying attention and voting accordingly is a pretty good solution. Unfortunately, almost no one does that (and it tends to be even worse at the local level).

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc).

And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.

> The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch.

That's carrying a lot of assumptions. That there's not a probe lying somewhere in the solar system watching us, that aliens haven't found a better way to observe us than probes, that they even care about observing us in the first place. Take the last one for example - 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone. It's entirely possible that we're not important enough for advanced societies to care, the way you're not going to stop and mess with every random anthill you pass by.

Imagine a couple of tigers talking. "Someone says there are 9 billion humans in the world." "That makes no sense. Take the amount of good hunting habitats in the world, divide it by the amount of territory an adult male would need to call their own, and divide that by the number of humans. You would have multiple humans fighting for each chunk of territory, and marking their scent everywhere. Yet I don't smell any human urine so the question is...where is everyone?"

As an aside, why do people focus so much on self replicating probes? Assuming aliens did want to send out a probe fleet - why not simply mass produce probes in one system (or a handful of systems) and send each in turn to their destinations? Having to accelerate, decelerate, build a probe, have the new one accelerate, decelerate, build another probe, have this new one accelerate, decelerate, etc., seems like it would take a lot longer than simply sending a probe directly to its destination (no need to constantly decelerate along the way, no need to waste energy moving replication units, etc.).

> But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes.

But we couldn't. In general, SETI couldn't even detect such a civilization even if it was in the star system closest to earth:

> If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?

> In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.

The OP is right, in order for their to be a paradox we have to assume that civilizations much more advanced than ours are using a particular type of tech (the kind we're looking for, like radio broadcasts), that their using much stronger signals that we have ever used, and that the time period they used these hypothetical super powerful radio signals happens to be at the right time for us to encounter them. IE, let's say they used them for 2,000 years before moving on to other tech, but the signals only reached earth between 1,548,000-1,546,000 BC, or 450,000-458,000 BC, etc.

People are making a set of very, very specific assumptions based on little evidence. Then they see that the evidence that is available suggests that it's unlikely that every single one of their assumptions is correct, and they respond by calling it a paradox.

[1] https://www.seti.org/faq

It seems that it's a quite common experience[1]:

> As prosecutors have accumulated power in recent decades, judges and public defenders have lost it. To induce defendants to plead, prosecutors often threaten “the trial penalty”: They make it known that defendants will face more-serious charges and harsher sentences if they take their case to court and are convicted. About 80 percent of defendants are eligible for court-appointed attorneys, including overworked public defenders who don’t have the time or resources to even consider bringing more than a tiny fraction of these cases to trial. The result, one frustrated Missouri public defender complained a decade ago, is a style of defense that is nothing more than “meet ’em and greet ’em and plead ’em.”

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

> Unless you have a clear alibi with documented proof that you were nowhere near the scene of the crime, every public defender in America (and plenty of private lawyers) recommends you take a plea deal.

And even when you have a clear alibi including video proof, you're still in grave danger[1]:

> Three months later, Juan would be facing a murder rap. The slaying in question had taken place on May 12, the same night he was at Dodger Stadium — 20 miles from the crime. Investigators didn’t buy his story. As covered in the Netflix documentary “Long Shot,” out Friday, Juan’s innocence would ultimately rest on a near brush with fame — more specifically, with Larry David and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

*

> Show’ producers allowed Melnik to view their footage from that day. He sourced eight 10-minute tapes before finding his holy grail: Juan, in his No. 27 Kevin Brown shirt, and his young daughter walking to their seats after returning from the concession stand.

*

> The discovery seemed a home run for Juan, who by then had been in jail over a month. Still, the prosecutor argued that the footage was from 9:10 p.m. — and the murder had occurred at 10:32. Juan ostensibly could have left early, driven to the scene of the crime, and still had time to kill Puebla.

It's worth reading the whole thing. They were going to push the death penalty for the guy. Eventually, his lawyer finds other evidence proving he wasn't there. After sitting in jail for five and a half months, he's finally let out, but then has to go back to jail for another 2 weeks because of a clerical error.

[1] http://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-saved-...

> Research should never be funded by tuition anyway.

I don't even think research should be coupled to the universities the way it currently is. From what I've seen it ends up being somewhat of a mess. Seeing what goes on there - for example, how grad students are treated - has made me doubt the ability of most universities to effectively manage and oversee research labs.

It's also adds one more thing to the odd stitched together thing we end up calling a university. It's a certification program/4-year summer camp/undergrad education center/research institute/cultural center/professional training center/sports franchise/etc.

> It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree.

That's been happening for hundreds of years. It's actually going more slowly now - productivity growth is some of the slowest that we've seen over the past 70 years[1].

It seems more likely that flashy tech (like articles about self driving cars and drone delivery) helped people believe a false narrative about the high unemployment that followed the financial crisis. It was also a narrative that exempted the political leadership - hey, we can't do anything to fix things, it's just a brave new world.

But the numbers are show that the theory is bunk. Not just the productivity numbers I mentioned, but also the employment participation rate[2].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

> Maybe people /should/ be more concerned about automation but they just aren’t right now.

Or maybe people should be less concerned about it. The rate of automation/productivity growth has actually been pretty low over the last decade[1], some of the slowest in the past 70 years.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm

I think the focus on "fake news" is in part a deflection from the mainstream media's own poor coverage of the 2016 race. For instance, all of the coverage the week before the election was about how Comey's bombshell letter upended the race - yet in the end, that letter turned out to be nothing.

It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.

> Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this?

I mean, Musk's initial announcement regarding the hyperloop was about how California high speed rail shouldn't be built. These are the first lines of his blogpost announcing the hyperloop[1]:

> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too.

We can debate Musk's motivation, but the fact remains that the hyperloop is being used to argue against high speed rail construction, and has been since it was first announced.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/hyperloop