Citizen's Override

So, this is another suggestion on how we can improve representational democracy from the giant mess its in, to something which is actually 'for the people'. As you may have surmised, I'm not a large fan of this political system for many reasons.

A quick summary to this idea is simply giving normal citizens the ability to call referenda without needing to go through parliamentary discussion, nor needing parliamentary members to vote for it.

In some cases, parliamentary members take decisions which are contrary to the country's best interests - or are driven by motives other than the greater good. The problem is that there is no mechanism for the people who get the short end of the stick (aka the civvies) to undo this damage - nor to direct them in a forceful manner to the right decision.


You could argue that unpopular decisions mean that the party won't get elected next time. That said, in reality this won't be the case unless they mess up something huge constantly and consistently. For one, large political parties have a large buffer of mindless drones who will always vote for them. For the second, there are many reasons for voting for a party. What if it made a horribly unpopular decision and many good ones? Do we want to remove a party from power because of that? Shouldn't there be a more efficient manner? For the third point, elections happen every 5 years or so. This is a long time. 


Also, there are certain decisions which are for the good of the people, which no politician will ever support - because it affects him/her negatively in a personal manner. Here are two real-life case studies to explain my points.


(Case Study 1: The transport minister made a mess of the public transport system. A vote of no confidence had (almost) all his party vote in his favor and all the opposition voting against him. If the people were allowed to vote on it, the guy would be out of there like a rocket)


(Case Study 2: Parliament members got a large pay rise, even though some of them own companies and rarely turn up at parliament)


A third problem is obviously that sometimes the politicians are subject to 'lobbying' (also known as bribes) or other such things. The Greeks found a solution to bribes in their courts - they used to have hundreds of Archons - so bribing a majority was difficult and expensive. Lets apply this solution.


So what's the band-aid over this gaping wound in democracy? Give the people the chance to make laws themselves. Bypass the parliament. The idea is that if a person succeeds in getting enough agreements on his petition, then instead of passing through parliament where it will be forgotten/ignored - it will be drafted into legalese and a referendum take place to determine whether it passes or not.

This is different from petitions and lobbying, as the vox populii directly modifies the laws, and bypasses the representatives. People who don't want to risk pulling their favourite party out of parliament can vote against them, because they're not losing anything.


Of course we can take this one step further and implement what I call Technodemocracy - which I'll talk about later.

The Llama.

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

So, last time I was having a think about crime and how society punishes it. And the fact is, that it doesn't really do a good job of it - when there is an obvious solution to it all.

The most common punishments which are reported on the news are jail time or fines. So lets start with Jail time.

Firstly, someone is paying for the incarceration. That's right, its the taxpayers. So we're paying money to keep people who have done some crimes fed and kept an eye on.

Secondly, it causes a lot of negative effects to other people. The prisoner's family suffers because of the fact that their family member is in prison. If the prisoner is a breadwinner, the entire family will have to live poorer because of the fact that s/he committed a crime. Letting other people suffer for the crimes of an individual is unfair.

Thirdly, it doesn't do the prisoner any good. Lets face it, prisons are there to act as a deterrent, they don't really 'fix' people. There was a statistic somewhere which asserted that when someone is sent to prison, there is a large chance of him going back to prison again. Apparently in California, 7/10 of prisoners return to prison within 3 years. This is for multiple reasons. As you can imagine, putting social pariahs in the same place to keep each other company won't make them better people, they'll pick up bad habits, get assaulted and won't really help out society when they're out. Also does anyone want to employ a previously incarcerated person? Not really.


So jails don't really work. Not for people within the system at least. Allright I recognise that some people need to be locked up so the rest of us can feel save. I don't want a mass murderer running around in my neighborhood. But those are the exception.

So what's the other popular alternative ? Fines.

The problem with fines is obvious - the value of the fine depends on your income. If laws set the fine too high, poorer people can't pay it, but then rich people won't care. You get fined (say) 50 euros for overspeeding - if you're a student who just bought the car and are under debt, you're going to sweat blood for that money. If you're a hotshot businessman and over-sped with your Audi, big deal - the waiters at the restaurant can get a smaller tip next time.

The ideal solution to these problems is simple. Put them to work doing something for the good of society.

There are tons of jobs around which are hard work and which need to be done - and which can be done by unskilled people. Instead of locking someone up for 15 years for sneaking drugs in, give him 780 days of such work. He can still support and provide for his family, he doesn't have to be in the company of delinquents, and he can spend his own personal free time once a week making society a better place. It doesn't have to be breaking rocks in a quarry, it could easily just be sweeping up the roads, or collecting garbage or planting flowers in the middle of roundabouts.

This sort of thing works exceptionally well for large companies as well. The company does something illegal? Instead of fining the company what is essentially a rounding error on their profit margin, grab the CEO and board of directors - and put them to work. The idea of a billionaire hotshot cleaning up garbage will be so deliciously humiliating that I'm pretty sure the company will straighten up VERY quickly.

And there you go. This sort of punishment is sometimes given out but not as frequently as I might like. Maybe if they handed it out for everything, society would work much better.

The Llama

Facebook Voting

Yeah I'm blogging about this now. Sometimes I need to do the really simple stuff...

So, lets first describe what I'm calling "Facebook Voting". Basically a company, group or whatever decides to have a competition which the public will vote on. And this vote will take place by placing the photos, or quotes or whatever on their wall, and people "Like" them to get votes. These are most common during christmas, valentine's day or something like that.

Example: "Llamas'R'Us is trying to see who has the nicest llama. Take a picture of your llama and post it on the wall so people will vote on it. Winner will get a free alpaca starter pack"

So, in theory it works well. Why not use a popular social network to see what the public in general likes, and collect votes using the simplest method. 

But what happens in practice? One Most All of the competitors will toddle off to their buddies and tell them to vote for them. So in the end the winner will be the person with the most willing friends. So when they have a competition, they really shouldn't bother with asking them to post pictures or whatever, they should just count the friends.

So, why do they still do this? Fact is that its all they really want. They're not interested in your picture of you with your girlfriend on valentine's day, what they want is people on their mailing list. Fact is before you can vote you have to 'like' their page. This automatically subscribes you all the updates which they'll produce - advertisements or whatever. its a total win for them.

So - how do you get the good stuff without the bad? The simplest solution is to tell your friends to stop asking you. Otherwise, if you really really like your friend you can :

a) Like them. Vote. Wait until your friend wins. Unlike


b) Like them. Vote. Open the newsfeed options and add them to the block list.


Simple.


Llama

Are domain names important?

[Warning: Slight ICT nerdiness ahead]

So, those of you who have been following the news will know that the .xxx domain is starting registrations. The idea is that Adult sites can have .xxx at the end instead of .com, .org or whatever. Already larger companies are trying to bag either own domain to prevent other people from using it. For example disney.xxx would be registered by Disney just to prevent someone making disney-themed adult content or something.


So, this leads to my question - Are domains still important? Is it vital to 'own' a particular domain, any similar spellings/mispellings or stuff you don't want people linking to your company? (The first one is called typosquatting, while the latter, to give an example - "atarisucks.com" is owned by Atari and redirects to their website).


In my opinion, the answer is no - and that it doesn't really matter anymore.


Before it may have been important. Search engines weren't so good at all, so if you wanted to visit an online shop, you're just go to h t t p colon slash slash w w w dot shop dot com or whatever. Your friend told you of an awesome website? He hands you the URL and you type it in yourself.


How many people still that sort of thing nowadays? If I'm looking for a website on llamas , I won't manually type in "llama.com" "llama.org" "llamas.com"... or whatever, I will open my favorite search engine, type in "llamas" and determine which websites seem most reputable by the blurb. The only times I type in the URL manually is if I know it by heart, or if I've visited the site before (so FF gets it from the history)


So in this day and age, we don't really need to have bagged a particular URL, since people are going to use a search engine to find the site anyway.


A funny note I'd like to end with was that I once bought a bottle of Gatorade, which upon its neck had "Google: Gatorade" written on it.


So, if you disagree, please Discuss.

Judgement

So, recently I've been seeing a lot of posts on why we shouldn't judge people. Generally these come with a number of case studies which make Occham spin in his grave so hard we could generate electricity. Instead of arguing about those (which I've done, repeatedly), I will instead suggest that judging people is necessary for society.

So, firstly, in order to ensure there's no misunderstanding, we're not talking about legal judgement. We're talking about people looking down upon a person or set of people based on a particular trait, by linking that trait to a negative label. So for example a teenage mother would be promiscuous, or whatever.

Now I'll explain my point. It is my opinion/observation, that judging people is an integral part of how society ensures its values remain static. Because the judged set are treated negatively, they will attempt to move out of that set. This can be a good way of keeping certain things down.

Does it work? Lets me an example which I hope will show that when something becomes more accepted (aka less judged) things will increase.

50-100 years ago, if you happened to be female and happened to become pregnant before you were married, you would be judged eight ways to Sunday (what a silly expression). The main policy over here in Malta was to either get married real quick, or to disappear to Gozo and give birth in a place where nobody knew you. My grandmother knew a woman who used to carry around a pillow under her dresses because her daughter had gotten pregnant and they wanted to pretend the future baby would be the mother's.

Nowadays, we have cheap access to contraceptives, more effective contraception and sex education in school. And yet the amount of kiddies born out of wedlock is increasing, to very large amounts.

I believe its because having kiddies out of wedlock is no longer shameful. In fact a certain tv show on a particular crappy channel which should have stuck to music, seems to glorify it.

Same thing for other things, more accepted they are, the more common they are - even though they are bad for society. See also: Divorce Party.

So I think allowing everyone to do whatever they want without judging them, is a good way to loosen society to a number of individuals pulling their own ropes.


Now I'm not suggesting we judge people for things they can't change or things they're not in control of. There's no point in judging people over the colour of their skin, or background. But there is a point in judging people who cross the line socially.


Discuss. I'm quite interested to hear what my local anthropologist thinks.


Llama

Idea: Mass Feeding

So here's an idea I had a while ago which I am going to share with you, maybe someone wants to execute it.

Lets take a look at something. Assume there are say 500 people living around you (by some metric), divided in 215 families. Every day, at least once, at least one member of that family takes food out from storage, wastes some time preparing it and feeds the family.

If we accept the assertion of 215 families, we realise how much of a waste of time, money and resources it is to have 215 different storage, purchasing and preparation units every day. So the idea is to centralise it.

Imagine you have a 'subscription-based' take away of sorts. To join in on this you pay some money every month. In return you're guaranteed a meal (two?) a day. With the money the company could afford to buy in bulk, hire a professional chef and offer a balanced diet. Theoretically, if enough people take on the offer, the cost required to purchase, store and prepare the food will be less than if everyone made it themselves.

"But they already invented that," I hear you say, "It's called a restaurant". Well this idea is different in two ways.

Firstly this idea is non-profit and intended to save the community money. Its a more efficient way of doing things, and it'll save people time.

Secondly, restaurants are there to offer attractive food as a form of entertainment. This idea would offer well-cooked balanced food instead of fancy stuff which is bad for you and which would be eaten irregularly.

Please feel free to Discuss.

The Llama

Economics

Once upon a time, a new species came upon this earth. Didn't have too many special abilities to survive, except for its larger brain. However they formed communities and tribes and they survived. A large part of this I believe was the ability to work in groups - they could hunt larger creatures and survive against predators. Unfortunatly once they mostly settled down, they started to prey on each other instead.

The way economics works is a brilliant example of how we prey and abuse each other for our own personal gains.

A 'rich' person is one who has a lot of money. You need these magical pieces of papers to get food, lodging and other things. Assuming that the world has a fixed amount of magical pieces of papers (ignore inflation or other things). Therefore whenever you are gaining some money, someone else is losing money - a zero-sum game. So by extension, there are ALWAYS going to be poor people, there are ALWAYS going to be people who can't afford anything, and we like it that way.

Lets take a theoretical example. You have a group of poor people living in a country. They lack basic sanitation, food and water. While many people would hate to live there, and feel sorry for the people there, they are a necessary part of the economy - they can be given rubbish jobs for poor pay. If they were richer, they wouldn't want to do those sorts of jobs - so they shouldn't be paid much either, we don't want them to crawl out of that hole. So when people collect money to save children in Africa or whatever, they're not treating the cause, they're slightly treating the symptoms. And the economy doesn't want those causes to be changed.

While as technology increases certain basic things will become affordable, there will always be people desperate enough to work for rubbish pay.

And this situation isn't likely to ever get any better. Rich people like staying rich, and rich people spend money on things which gives lots of profits to richer people - while a poor person might spend the money on food, a rich person will buy items which are produced by larger companies and which have a larger profit point - think about how expensive a luxury car is - how much of that is the actual cost of the materials and labour?

Sure you could argue that wealth will 'trickle down', but lets take some real life values - a particular company had the following values last year:

Revenue: $ 65.23 billion

Profit: $ 14.01 billion

So, lets take a look. The Revenue is the amount of money that people lost to buy this company's products and services. The difference of course is the amount of money it gave to its employees in return for their services. The difference is still a significant amount - where does that go ? To the pockets of shareholders who are already very rich.


So we can see the economy as a partition between the richer and the poor. The rich absorb more of the world's money - both though buying/selling of services amongst each other - and by giving not-so-much to those who don't belong in this special group.


And we fight and bicker amongst ourselves instead of living as a society which cares for each other.


Llama