Lazy Armchair Enthusiast Making Proposals For Change ITT

[POFP]

So, this is where I pretend to know fuck-all about how the world works, politically, economically, socially, sexually, bisexually, gaysexually, pansexually, plantsexually, but more specifically, geoplate-sexually (Attraction to the cleavage created by tectonic plates shifting under and around each other  ). There is a somewhat low possibility that I might end up coming to a coherent and reasonable conclusion on a topic here, or maybe even there. So I figured this painful release of built-up cognitive sludge might be somewhat useful to someone at some point. In-fact, if this can turn into a collage of solutions to current problems, I will update this post with due credit. Maybe, if we get enough detail and agreement, we can all pretend like the system works like it's supposed to and send a less casual copy to our local representatives. I feel active and humanistic right now, and maybe getting my ideas ripped apart by YOU ideological piranhas, will give me some sense of fulfillment. Also, if you have anything relevant to add to any of the subjects I mention, please do so without censorship or remorse.

Let's talk about some shit that appears generally obvious to any modern intellectual, first. These things have probably been talked about and re-asserted on this forum for quite awhile, so we'll keep them brief:

The War on Drugs is bullshit. Redirecting the funding aimed at criminalizing drug use toward a system that treats addiction to these drugs would drastically increase the quality of life for most of the least fortunate members of our society. The bottom part of the country would be MUCH better off without an addiction pandemic. And let's not pretend that the amount of funds that the War on Drugs requires couldn't fund such a support system. Also, this idea has been demonstrated before, and is only deniable by the most ignorant right-wingers. I'm also going to take a totally blind shot in the dark and argue that you could probably decrease income taxes on everyone if you taxed the shit out of drugs. That last statement was derived from a baseless, shallow idea that popped into my head while writing this. If it's somewhat valid, I'll let someone else do the math to back it up. I don't think I have the attention span for that right now.

(Currently doing this at work. Will add more when I have time. Feel free to fuck shit up in the mean-time.)

EDIT 1:

Environmental Progress: I hate that the American Left assumes that because Liberal Socialist countries are the ones making strides in environmental issues and sustainability, that Socialism is required to make those strides. The left also likes to ignore that different people of different demographics speak different languages. They claim "Well, because this issue is important and morally superior, then that means we can use legislation to force companies to make unprofitable, or drastic changes to their business strategies and production systems to solve this issue."

All the left has to realize, is that the conservative right and the rich all speak one language: Money (Well, and sometimes Jesus.)

To completely change or create a system that's important to the economy in the private sector, it takes Creative Innovation on a massive scale, and it takes a profitable business model that is mostly new. For example, Denmark's trash and recycling system, as far as I know, is based on each household separating their own trash and taking it to their respective dumps/recycling facilities. This contrasts most of America's private trash systems, where most of it is just picked up in the company vehicles and sent to facilities to be separated there, or thrown into the dump with very little processing. I believe Denmark also charges nothing for recyclables that are given to the facilities, but charge a fee for trash that's not recyclable. From a business stand-point, having the separation done at home, and charging fees for trash is a much more profitable business model. That system eliminates a massive cost at the facility for general separation. AND you still get to charge people for trash. Denmark's system is government mandated, whereas a brilliant innovation of that basic system in America can create an EXTREMELY PROFITABLE and GREEN company.

I'm not an environmentalist, but if I wanted to make more money out of a company of mine, I would be working towards independence and sustainability, given that the technology is there. But most rich people have an old way of thinking when it comes to business models because they are still in the ME ME ME ME ME mindset. So, new, universally beneficial systems are hard to build support for in a corporate environment. Countries like Denmark have the business model, even though they aren't making money off of it. But that's simply because they don't have the BRILLIANT innovation that America has always been known for producing in other markets. It just takes a market baron - a genius to produce an original way of dealing with a cost aspect of the market. A simple invention can remove almost all cost from an entire level of the system, which will undoubtedly change the mind of a conservative rich person.

Instead of trying to change the way our economy works, why not take advantage of the economy and the simplicity of its cornerstone's (The wealthy corporations) way of thinking? Want to introduce more red tape and regulatory legislation? How about you invent a new, cheap way to break down certain types of trash or transport it instead? Or maybe come up with a valid, cost-efficient form of sustainable energy? Take these conservative rich bastards' hands, and walk them across the street to the GREEN side. They need a helping hand, not to be forced at gun-point. The government doesn't have to take responsibility for everything involving progress. America has lost its faith in the private sector, and I believe that is why we have the conflict we see in politics today.

[Pergamos]

The war on drugs has several important purposes.  It keeps the prisons full, and is a huge part of local police funding (with seizures) It also ensures that the big players don't have to deal with small scale competition and keeps the price of drugs high enough to be extremely lucrative.  If we are going to do away with it we need to find another way to fund the cops, and figure out how to appease or deal with the private prison corps and the drug supplying cartels. 

[POFP]

The war on drugs has several important purposes.  It keeps the prisons full, and is a huge part of local police funding (with seizures) It also ensures that the big players don't have to deal with small scale competition and keeps the price of drugs high enough to be extremely lucrative.  If we are going to do away with it we need to find another way to fund the cops, and figure out how to appease or deal with the private prison corps and the drug supplying cartels.

We convert the local police system into one dedicated to safety, instead of aggressive enforcement. Doing so in the poorest parts of the country will get rid of one of the major influential factors in poverty: Violence.

The cops where I used to live drove around in blacked out cars so as to be hidden. All of their systems were designed to be discreet and stealthy, and all their systems are updated on a monthly basis with the top of the line shit. That is not what cops are supposed to be. Especially when the city they are in has absolutely no violence or negligence, or any law breaking at all, for that matter. Where I am now, the cops are in white cars with some red and blue lights on by default, demonstrating that they are there for you to reach out to if you need help. The cops in my old tiny ass town need to have their funding cut, and the ones where I live now need their funding raised. Redistribute the funding and you can solve a lot of problems.

We're not trying to have a prison state, here. The statement about the prisons made me wonder if you were just being sarcastic or playing Devil's Advocate. But I'll address it anyways:
The private prison corps can suck my cock.

As for the Drug Cartels, we simply do what the CIA has most likely been doing for decades: We facilitate deals and trade-routes with markets that are unaffected by legalization, which would most likely be outside of the US, or we put a bullet in the head of every drug cartel player and stop fucking with that shit. There are more profitable markets out there for the CIA to milk money out of.

[Salty]

Nuke the earth, problems solved.

[POFP]

Nuke the earth, problems solved.

BUT BUT BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POOR AND THE ANIMALS AND THE CHILDREN AND THE TREES AND THE FISH AND THE POLAR BEARS AND THE POOR?

[Salty]

Nuke the earth, problems solved.

BUT BUT BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POOR AND THE ANIMALS AND THE CHILDREN AND THE TREES AND THE FISH AND THE POLAR BEARS AND THE POOR?

The whom?

You mean these piles of radiated bones?

[POFP]

Nuke the earth, problems solved.

BUT BUT BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POOR AND THE ANIMALS AND THE CHILDREN AND THE TREES AND THE FISH AND THE POLAR BEARS AND THE POOR?

The whom?

You mean these piles of radiated bones?

Riiiiiiiight, radiated bones aren't people, just like fetuses and zygotes aren't babies. YOU'RE A SICK MAN. SICK I TELL YOU! 

[Pergamos]

Interesting that you say "fuck the prison corps" but not "fuck the drug cartels"  I am not a fan of either, but both are powerful, and finding a way to deal with them is reuired if we are going to make real changes.

[POFP]

JesusFuckDamn!™ Is this how low I sank in the last couple months? My writing lacks any amount of direction or sophistication, and is exhausting. And it's all try-hardy and icky.

Now that I'm getting my brain back, I'm going to start not shitposting.

Interesting that you say "fuck the prison corps" but not "fuck the drug cartels"  I am not a fan of either, but both are powerful, and finding a way to deal with them is reuired if we are going to make real changes.

Yeah, the notification for this post went away after I saw it awhile ago, and I forgot to respond. Soz.

I don't know enough about the drug cartel, or its systems of control, to come up with a way to tear it down.
Gonna go do some research.

[Cramulus]

Environmental Progress:

In summary, it sounds like you're saying (and please correct me if I'm missing it - I don't want to put words in your mouth) that we just need big corporations to come up with innovative ways to go green which are cheaper than the traditional ways. And that we shouldn't be coercing corporations into "going green", we need them to do it on their own.

I mean, yeah, that all sounds good, but how do you do it?

Personally, I don't think there is a way to get everybody to cooperate when there are such big benefits to defecting. I think you need regulations.

The non-libertarian FAQ has a great example of why you'll never see that altruistic, cooperative behavior emerge out of mutual self-interest:

Coordination problems are cases in which everyone agrees that a certain action would be best, but the free market cannot coordinate them into taking that action.

As a thought experiment, let's consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let's say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month - still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let's call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he's not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month - less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying "Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone's productivity goes down."

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let's call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit...

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The most profitable solution to this problem is for Steve to declare himself King of the Lake and threaten to initiate force against anyone who doesn't use a filter. This regulatory solution leads to greater total productivity for the thousand fish farms than a free market could.

The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake). I intentionally chose aquaculture for this example because privatization doesn't work. Even after the entire lake has been divided into parcels and sold to private landowners (waterowners?) the problem remains, since waste will spread from one parcel to another regardless of property boundaries.

[Freeky]

Environmental Progress:

In summary, it sounds like you're saying (and please correct me if I'm missing it - I don't want to put words in your mouth) that we just need big corporations to come up with innovative ways to go green which are cheaper than the traditional ways. And that we shouldn't be coercing corporations into "going green", we need them to do it on their own.

I mean, yeah, that all sounds good, but how do you do it?

Personally, I don't think there is a way to get everybody to cooperate when there are such big benefits to defecting. I think you need regulations.

The non-libertarian FAQ has a great example of why you'll never see that altruistic, cooperative behavior emerge out of mutual self-interest:

Coordination problems are cases in which everyone agrees that a certain action would be best, but the free market cannot coordinate them into taking that action.

As a thought experiment, let's consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let's say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month - still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let's call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he's not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month - less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying "Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone's productivity goes down."

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let's call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit...

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The most profitable solution to this problem is for Steve to declare himself King of the Lake and threaten to initiate force against anyone who doesn't use a filter. This regulatory solution leads to greater total productivity for the thousand fish farms than a free market could.

The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake). I intentionally chose aquaculture for this example because privatization doesn't work. Even after the entire lake has been divided into parcels and sold to private landowners (waterowners?) the problem remains, since waste will spread from one parcel to another regardless of property boundaries.

That's a pretty nifty breakdown, actually. 

[Cain]

The most profitable solution to this problem is for Steve to declare himself King of the Lake and threaten to initiate force against anyone who doesn't use a filter.

AKA the Dork Enlightenment/non-democratic libertarian solution to everything.

[Pergamos]

The most profitable solution is for everyone to initiate force against anyone who doesn't use a filter.  Force in this case being freeing all his fish and trashing his farm.  This is classic tragedy of the commons, the "libertarian" solution is for each pond to be owned by only one person and where an arrangement to sell out cannot be arranged to divide the pond with walls impenetrable to waste, Elinor Ostrom has some rather better ideas about community management of resources.  Theres a  decent site on her work on the topic here.

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Incidentally, she started her work dealing with water.

[minuspace]

[edit; Pergamos beat me to it] Reminds me of that chap Lloyd, and his Tragedy of the Commons, where IIRC the rational self-interest of users acts independently of others, thereby depleting common resources.  This assumes, however, that rational self-interest must be at odds with ethical reasoning.

Could it be possible for a free agent to reason that their capacity to act independently is inextricably interrelated to the free agency of others? Can my rational self-interest be extensive enough to include the effect it has on others?

In the end, there is absolutely nothing rational about entirely depleting a common resource, because reason cannot defend an action that undermines the conditions required by it in the first place:
fishing all the fish != fishing.

A little neo-Kantian idealism practically never hurt no one.

(I replaced not having a filter with overfishing, I hope that still works;)

[LMNO]

I think the word people are looking for here is "compassion".


But the scope of that word is too much for some monkeys to bear.