roastpotatothief

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.

One problem with government, even in a perfect democracy, is that it cannot solve local issues. Things like parks, parking, bridges, flooding are always local. They require difficult decisions, study and attention lasting weeks or months, to solve. Often they are only comprehensible to local people. Usually each area requires a different kind of solution.

Democracy is capable of fixing the ineptitude of government. It will change teh nature of government, to be effective, fast, and legitimate. But it cannot solve local issues any better than today's western governments. Effective local government is required.

To be effective, local government needs to be able to raise taxes and build infrastructure. It also needs to exist on many scales. So legislature needs to be created to allow such things to form and dissolve, as local issues arise and as they are needed by communities.

To be clear, conventional county and city councils are not the kind of local government referred to here. Although they are formed through elections, they are not effective at solving local issues.

This is because they are not flexible - their size and powers are appropriate for solving some kinds of problems but not others. For example they are good an building parks and libraries, but not fixing potholes or creating bus routes. They only work well when the scale of the project is the same as the scale of the council.

For example one road might have a problem or project that is not interesting for anyone outside it. It could take years or longer to persuade a county council to act.

Or a transport route might be needed that requires coordination between several councils. They will never agree on the funding.

Local government should exist on many scales, such that their authority overlaps.

A group of residents of an area should define the area covered, and the remit of the new government. After obtaining enough signatures, this should go to a vote of the area's residents. If enough (for example 70%) of the residents agree, the government will be formed.

(I think that 70% majority should be required for any action, like charging a tax or building something. But for a negative action like abolishing a tax or government, only 50% is needed. So only overwhelmingly popular things will be done. There should be a few other obvious restrictions on their power, like inability to act against residents of other areas.)

Once formed, the government can charge taxes, do public works, make laws, charge fines, etc. Normally the staff would be volunteer, but there would be nothing stopping it from paying people for the admin work that must be done, or hiring salaried staff. But it can only act within its remit and only after passing a vote.

The vote to create a government should be postal, but after that, the nature of further votes should be declared in the government's constitution. Maybe only those who attend the meetings can vote on normal issues.

All of this requires some changes to the law of the territory-level government. But there is much reason to make those changes now.

Most people agree about the ongoing Ukrainian war. Russia invaded Ukraine. Invasion is wrong. There is much resulting damage and suffering and death.

This is all true.

But it focuses on the superficial, immediate goings on and misses out on the context and reasons. There is no point in blaming people or regimes for things they have been compelled to do by circumstance, for which they have no choice.

There is an opportunity for a new world order where regimes are punished for invasion, by for example being excluded from international banking systems and trade and airspace. As a first consequence, Israel would be immediately punished for its ongoing invasion of Palestine, in breach of a peace treaty which it has signed, and the ongoing genocide in the occupied territory. This is a much worse and clear cut case than that of Russia and Ukraine.

But Israel will not be punished as Russia has been. Because this is not about war and peace, or right and wrong, or crime and punishment, or even good and bad or preventing suffering. This is about the USA and Russian and their ongoing political competion. Russia is being punished, and its people pushed into further poverty, and losing access to the sea, just because it suits the USA's geopolitical interests.

Economies need access to the sea. It is the one crucial thing they need for security and prosperity. Landlocked countries are all poor.

Russia is already a very poor country. It cannot risk losing access to the Mediterranean. Losing this access would mean losing trade routes, making goods more expensive, and the people poorer. Being cut off from the sea is a disaster for a country, even one with coastal provinces thousands of miles away.

Russia will not lose access to the sea in Ukraine. It will fight forever and make huge sacrifices to keep that access. It will do whatever it takes, because it has no choice. The alternative is eternal destitution.

Russia must regain good political relations with Ukraine, or else subsume the south-eastern portion containing the deep-water ports.

Russia also has a good justification for invading. Ukraine signed a peace treaty with Russia, then broke its rules. Then it made laws to persecute Russians living in Ukraine. That provoked Russia and created the political opportunity to invade.

Ukraine has nothing to gain from separating Russia from the sea, and economically much to lose. Ukraine has nothing to gain from being endlessly at war. This USA's war.

It is the USA which is working to separate Russia from the sea. It has worked hard on this for years, supporting (or possibly instigating) the Ukrainian regime change, and heavily supporting the Ukrainian government and army since then.

The USA is paying for the war and supplying the weapons and all sorts of support. It is a proxy war between Russia and the USA, identical to many others before it, spanning 100 years.

Russia has repeatedly asked for peace talks. It wants to end the war, regain access to the sea, and guarantee the protection of Russians. So why does Ukraine refuse to negotiate a peace?

This option would anger the USA. Ukraine would be punished forever by the global powers, and maybe become a poor pariah state like others which opposed the USA (like Russia).

There are theories. For example what happened to Gaddafi and Libya after refusing to trade in dollars. But I think only Mr Zelenskyy knows. He has been working very closely with USA agencies for years. There must be some personal arrangement where this is in his interests.

Without USA support, the war would end in an instant. Ukraine would be forced to negotiate a peace, a new border would be drawn, and the region could become more prosperous. This would be the ideal result.

It is unrealistic to talk of reparations from Russia. These only happen after total defeats, like in world war 1. They usually inspire the conflict to resume soon after. This will not be the outcome.

The war will end in the normal way, with compromise. Probably Russia will get some land. Ukraine will get peace and maybe economic aid.

The war will continue until the USA stops supporting it.

But the USA is very happy for the war to continue. I has a need to be at war constantly, to spend and justify its military budget, to test and develop weapons and strategies and logistics, to test its competitors' military abilities.

The best thing about the war is that it wastes Russia's money and weakens it economically. Pushing Russia deeper into poverty is a major focus of the USA regime. The USA will try to keep the war going forever.

Most people agree that summer/winter time is counter-productive. this is true.

• It creates confusion, clock-changing work, disturbed sleep, and missed appointments twice a year.
• It changes the time-zone differences many times a year, because different territories do not all change on the same day.
• It has no advantages. Some people say that the school hours must be shifted to ensure they are always during daylight, but really that's an argument for shifting the school hours twice a year, not the whole notion of time.

But this is only the first step. Time zones are not needed at all. Just as society quickly changed from imperial to metric one generation, we could switch all of business and society to UTC. Only the old can continue to use the local times if they choose to, by applying the conversion. This solves one extra big problem:

• In small countries and near borders of big countries and international settings, nobody is ever sure what time it is. All the confusion with airport and train schedules, gone.

This sounds nice but it does bring up a problem. Here are four versions and solutions of it.

1. The day changes when the clock is at 0:00h UTC. It changes from Tuesday to Wednesday at an arbitrary point during the day. Christmas Day starts and ends at a different time of day in each place. How do bank holidays work then?
2. Use UTC but the days don't change at 0:00h, they change at midnight, whatever time that is locally.
3. We keep a few local time zones, maybe one for each continent, so that 0:00h is always during the night.
4. We use UTC but also keep some concept of a local time, somehow.

This is the question that must be answered before we can resolve the scourge of time-zone chaos on our global society.

As an aside, I find it mad that we have all these discussions about clock and calendar reform, but the only unit we never try to reform is the week, even though the week is the only truly arbitrary unit. Somehow the week feels right and useful, but the natural units all feel wrong.