Why can't employers find enough people to do the work of society? There aren't enough people available to work as teachers, vets, bus drivers, etc. All these common, essential jobs are going unfilled in large numbers, leading to problems in the functioning of society as a whole.

And this despite rising poverty levels forcing ever more women into the workforce, and high immigration rates increasing the relative number of people of working age.

So what are the adults of Ireland all doing, that they're not available to do these jobs?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-lfs/labourforcesurveyquarter22021/employment/

Well for a start, 15% are working in "motor vehicles". This sounds too high. I'm sure this industry does not need so many people. It's the same number as work in "human health".

How can this number be reduced, to allow more people to work in more valuable jobs?

1. Extra tax on high earning jobs like "motor vehicle" tradesmen? This could be used to fund higher salaries for jobs like driving buses. If the market is thus manipulated so essential jobs pay better, people will switch jobs and the problem is solved.

2. Promote cars which are more durable and require less frequent maintenance. Punish the sale of new cars and especially cars which cannot easily be maintained by the owner, or whose parts cannot easily and cheaply be acquired by normal people.

Encouraging electric bikes and electric cars will not help. I mean it won't help in general, but it especially won't help with this problem. Electric bikes and electric cars require more frequent maintenance and replacement than conventional cars. It is possible to design electric vehicles which are far more durable that petrol ones, because of technology advantages. But that will not happen until it is promoted through taxation, as above.

3. The need for vehicles in general is proportional to how badly towns are planned. Housing, jobs, and amenities and leisure need to be placed near each other. The placement should be enforced by planning law. This reduces commuting distances and increases usage of "mobilités douces".

So only #3 is the real solution. Through a happy coincidence, this is also the solution to most of society's other problems, like the housing crisis, drug use and bad behaviour and petty crime, global warming, etc.

Although #3 is simple and obvious, it requires critical thinking which the current government is not capable of. So it is worth remembering for after the next election.

with artistic training or brain stimulation we could look beneath the intrinsic nature of qualia to see the raw associations that make them up, just as a musician hears the individual components in what, to most fans, is a wall of sound. “It should be possible to experience parts of those underlying structures directly, just as we can learn to experience the individual overtones of a sound,”

The proposition, then, is that redness, pain, and the other qualities of experience are a blurred view of a dense thicket of relations. Red is red not because it just is, but because of a vast number of associations that we have learned or been born with.

Someone asked me what the government should be doing differently about the housing crisis. I ended up with this list. So it's not exhaustive.

I think all of these are necessary to have a functioning housing market which (1) allows people to live in peace (2) builders to work productively to produce useful housing (3) stop investors gouging people (4) allows people to easily move house when they need to (5) allows people to choose to rent or house as suits their needs without huge costs.

But if any one of these is enacted it will tangible improve many people's lives. Some of these I have already written about before in more depth. Others I will write about soon. I understand that most readers won't see the value of these without a lot more explanation.

1. zoning offices vs housing in areas which lack them
2. incentivise appts w amenities instead of big houses (planning law depends on local need for cheap housing)
3. big tax per land area (or per house) & big UBI/subsidy for each resident/person
4. big vacancy tax, using the register of people's addresses instead of self-certification. owners unwilling to pay must forfeit the property to the state.
5. remove costs of moving (stamp duty, seller does survey, govt does conveyancing)
6. price control (like capital gains tax / rental windfall tax)
7. tenants rights (ban on no fault evictions, sell the house with the tenants, tenants first right to buy, inspections, whistleblowing hotline, etc)
8. ban businesses owning housing (exemptions for universities etc who can get licences)
9. Ban on anyone owning >2 houses
10. open land register - know about vacancy rates and amenities/jobs/houses ratio

Hit and runs have been in the news a lot lately. More people need dashcams. But most people have no urgent need to buy one, and they are hassle to install.

This is an easy one for the government to fix. Decree that every garage must offer to do dashcam installation during routine services. Optionally, decree that they must do it for no extra charge.

When a good portion of people take up this option, there will be a critical mass of carmeras on the roads. Hit and runs will become very risky. When people know there is a chance the accident has been recorded, they will not run.

Uniquely, this solution does not enable ubiquitous surveillance by the state, because dashcams are not internet-connected.

It will also be useful that other types of accidents and events will be recorded. People will hesitate before doing anything violent or illegal in the street, when footage can be easily sent to the gardaí or the media. This includes dangerous not-illegal driving, searching for missing people etc.

This is simple, free, and necessary. It must be done now.

We have this problem, especially since the Covid educational chaos, that examiners are under pressure to inflate grades. This is understandable and happening for good reasons.

It predictably creates the problem that there are too many people scoring 100% on tests. With many people on identical marks, universities cannot select the students with the best aptitudes.

They are starting to do lotteries. This is unfair. It means that the whole leaving cert has failed to do its job of testing students for eligibility for university. It is not properly filtering students into courses by aptitude. If universities are going to do lotteries to select students, we don't need a leaving cert at all.

The solution is old and well known. the exams are written using whatever scoring system is deems appropriate for that subject. It does not need to be out of 100. Then the results are converted into percentiles, using the bell curve. This means that the best 1% of students get a mark of 100, the worst 1% get 1, and the median/average students get 50. All the other marks follow the same pattern.

(To be kind, it might be decided to give all the worst 10% of students a mark of 10. There might be gaps where for example a mark of 71 does not exist, only 70 and 72, but that is easily dealt with by the simple algorithm.)

There will be no grade inflation. The whole annual stress and debate becomes obsolete and we can focus on the many real issues and problems with the leaving cert.

Percentiles and statistics (L-estimators in this case) are very common in the adult world. L-estimators are fundamental to medicine, engineering, science, etc. It is good that students and teachers become familiar with them. This method is not complex or weird or confusing. If students get used to it, it will help them understand the world better and perform in their careers.