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allow supreme court to suggest simplification by supermajority
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http://columbialawreview.org/ham-sandwich-nation_reynolds/ suggests that in the U.S. everyone is guilty of a felony, and that prosecutorial discretion is to blame. since removing prosecutorial discretion is hard, instead they focus on other remedies:
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Overall, the problem stems from a dynamic in which those charged with crimes have a lot at risk, while those doing the charging have very little “skin in the game.” One source of imbalance is prosecutorial immunity. The absolute immunity of prosecutors—like the absolute immunity of judges—is a judicial invention, a species of judicial activism that gets less attention than many other less egregious examples. Although such immunity no doubt prevents significant mischief, it also enables significant mischief by eliminating one major avenue of accountability. Even a shift to qualified, good faith immunity for prosecutors would change the calculus significantly, making subsequent review something that is at least possible.
Another remedy might be a “loser pays” rule for criminal defense costs. After all, when a person is charged with a crime, the defense—for which non-indigent defendants bear the cost—is an integral part of the criminal justice process.17 For guilty defendants, one might view this cost as part of the punishment. But for those found not guilty, it looks more like a taking: Spend this money in the public interest to support a public endeavor, or go to jail. Perhaps the prosecution could be required to pay a defendant’s legal fees if he or she is not convicted. To further discipline the process, one could implement a pro-rate system: Charge a defendant with twenty offenses, but convict on only one, and the prosecution must bear 95% of the defendant’s legal fees. This would certainly discourage overcharging.
The “nuclear option” of prosecutorial accountability would involve banning plea bargains. An understanding that every criminal charge filed would have to be either backed up in open court or ignominiously dropped would significantly reduce the incentive to overcharge. It would also drastically reduce the number of criminal convictions achieved by our justice system. But given that America is a world leader in incarceration, it is fair to suggest that this might be not a bug, but a feature.18 Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top.19
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It is also worth considering whether mere regulatory violations—malum prohibitum rather than malum in se—should bear criminal sanctions at all. Traditionally, of course, citizens have been expected to know the law. Yet traditionally, regulatory crimes usually applied only to citizens in specialty occupations, who might be expected to be familiar with applicable regulatory law. Ordinary citizens needed no special knowledge to avoid committing rape, robbery, theft, etc. But now, with the explosion of regulatory law, every citizen is at risk of criminal prosecution for crimes that, as David Gregory’s defenders noted,20 involve no actual harm or ill intent. Yet any reasonable observer would have to conclude that actual knowledge of all applicable criminal laws and regulations is impossible, especially when those regulations frequently depart from any intuitive sense of what “ought” to be legal or illegal. Perhaps placing citizens at risk in this regard constitutes a due process violation; expecting people to do (or know) the impossible certainly sounds like one. "
-- http://columbialawreview.org/ham-sandwich-nation_reynolds/
since we are designing our own bylaws, we can remove prosecutorial discretion. but it does seem nice that the prosecutors can decide not to prosecute someone who meant well but got caught by a poorly written law. Instead of giving them the power to essentially almost-pardon people (we already give pardoning to the tribunes), let's give them the power to fix the law: a majority of the Prosecutor Council can create a temporary amendment to the law that (only) makes it more lenient. This then causes the immediate putting on hold of any cases against someone who are being charged for something that no longer applies, and prevents new cases from being brought that are covered by the temporary amendment while it is in effect. The temporary amendment is then put to a vote using the same procedure as Simplification, after which it either becomes normal, permanent law (in which cases the on-hold cases are dismissed), or it is retracted.
i also like banning plea bargins.
i also like, in cases in which the prosecution is the Organization, that the Organization pays pro-rated fees depending on what proportion of charges stick (perhaps weighted by punishment)
also, i think i mentioned this before, but 20 offenses is too many. Limit offenses to 3 per crime/scheme/project (note: a company is not just one 'project', and it can involve many 'crimes') hmmm mb that's a bad idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451401 . the argument is that is leads a criminal to think 'may as well' to commit more lesser crimes once they've committed 3 greater ones. i guess the pro-rated fees might be enough?
also, i like the 'infraction/crime' distinction. The distinction is just: they are both crimes, but the distinction is in the community's opinion of you after conviction. but if it's a 'infraction' then you bent a rule. if it's a 'crime' then the community thinks you did something evil (a felon was, at the time they commited their crime, a bad person).
we should provide a right to jury trial only for criminal, crime trials (which implies, only for trials where the organiation is the prosecution).
furthermore, we should have grand juries for indictment of felonies.
i also like the ideas that regulations can only be infractions.
furthermore, i think we should abolish or at least weaken this 'ignorance of the law is no excuse', at least for felonies:
i like the idea that it should be reasonable, practical, and feasible for every person engaged in any specialty occupation to personally be familiar with the conditions under which every crime law (specialty + general) regarding them applies (e.g. 'the conditions under which the law applies' is intended to screen out laws like the Lacey act http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1025 which apparently puts an infeasible burden upon everyone to learn about too many laws, even though if the text of the Lacey act itself is short).
also, mb a restriction that crimes must be things that at least 2/3s of the organization's members would already think of as evil/immoral/unethical, even if there was no a law against it (idea from http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1031 ). in the words of http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1055 , criminal laws may only describe the membership's values, it cannot prescribe them.
also, mb no 'strict liability': at least for felonies: even though the organization may not have to prove evil intent for some laws, in any case you cannot be guilty of a crime if a reasonable person would think that the balance of the evidence points towards it being more likely that the violation was unintentional and that a typical person (with the same licensing as the defendant) would not have known it was a violation. apparently this was the original idea anyway: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1157
also, to prevent http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1043 (accidentaly omission of intent requirements from the law), say that any crime requires intent unless the law specifically says otherwise
so, for felonies, we have 4 gates after the laws and regulations have been written:
the grand jury (can refuse to indite) the prosecutor council (can make the law more lenient) the court (can rule that the total body of crime law is too complex for this area, and that there was either no intent to break the law, or no intent to harm anyone) the high court (can add Found Rights at the Bylaw level)
and for non-felonies, we have 2 of these (prosecutor council, high court)
only crimes can involve 'punitive' sanctions or restrictions on freedom (bars to working in an occupation (beyond certification requirements, see below), jail time, etc). infractions can however lead to an individual or organization being stricken from some Organization-maintained 'good list' e.g. list of allowed bidders, list of recommended/certified licensees/practictioners), or withdrawal of certification even if certification is required to practice some occupation.
also mb a max penalty on infractions relating to the defendent's net worth or income? like, no more than the half your net worth?
p.s. on the fifth, i like an absolute right against self-incrimination in police custody. However, one's voluntary, public statements before any custody or charges can be used against you (e.g. if you brag to the newspaper that you did it). Such a confession must be your own idea, not something the organization made you do. In fact, even 'induced' confessions, where the organization got the confession via threats or promises, are disallowed. (i guess a similar principal could be used to rule out plea bargaining)
note: if we want to have military tribunals, then only during declared emergencies.
also, declared emergencies must be specific and have both reasonable time limits and reasonable exit conditions declared. A declared emergency must present an immediate and non-ongoing threat to the organization's existence and must require a speedy response.
todo read http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2457 (i already read 1008-1185 and 2458-2539) "no inquistatorial proceedings" -- apparently some legal history jargon that is supposed to prevent torture and coerced confessions
mb make one exception; operating in a specialty without the required license (and note above that i think only DMV-ish licensing requirements are appropriate except where public safety is concerned) can be a misdemeanor, b/c otherwise it'll be hard to show mens rea for violating the various regulations later
also to prevent http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1064 (the example is prosecution of someone for making a prediction that was 'unwarranted'), the extent of application of criminal law must be objective
punishment must only be proportionate to the offense
not surprisingly some of my fixes are same recommended by that comic:
"
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http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=188 goes into different 'mens rea' states. They seem to be:
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random rant:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753117
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limits on the amount of time it takes a typical member to obtain a license for most things to 1 month of classes, like with a driver's license. the license times must be at most proportional to the amount of harm the individual can do, e.g. driving a car can maim or kill a small number of people, so other things that can at worst maim or kill a small number of people at a time shouldn't have much more license requirements (i guess doctors fall under that). things like e.g. designing a nuclear power plant, which can hurt seriously hurt or kill large numbers of people, can have greater requirements. the Organization may also 'certify' people that it deems to be well-educated for other stuff (e.g. cancertify doctors who actually went to med school), but this certification is purely informational and the organization can't treat non-certified ppl differently, except as a requirement to bid on its own projects.
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nothing like the secret no-fly lists: if the government has targeted you in any way that may adversely affect your life, you have a right to be told whether you are targeted and to have an open procedure for removing your targetting. if such a case goes to court, you are entitled to see the evidence against you, and security concerns will not adversely affect your ability to compel information.
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could have part of the public defender's office controlled by the biggest minority party. E.g. if you are assigned a defender, you can opt to be assigned one by that party, for which purpose the minority parties can by themself legislatively levy a tax on the whole population (!). This gives the system two shots to decently fund public defense attorneys.
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no 'meta gag orders', or rather, a gag order can prevent you from telling who is being bugged specifically, but it cannot prevent you from telling the nature of the surveillance and that there is a gag order; e.g. only the specific name can be gagged.
no gag order whatsoever can prevent you from talking to your lawyer or to your spouse or to courts, law enforcement, and politicians in high office (e.g. chairs, legislators, ministers, and whomever these people reasonably delegate to receive this information)
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you should always receive at least the same privilage of secrecy when you talk to your immediate family as when you talk to your lawyer
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you can't prevent someone from paying their lawyer by freeze their bank accounts; even frozen accounts can still be tapped for legitimate legal fees, provided there isn't enough in unfrozen accounts to do so (in addition to paying the rent, college fees, etc) although perhaps with some extra procedure to ensure that the lawyer isn't being used to launder the money
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the organization may not make rules that categorically constrain the freedom of members merely for the purpose of making the world a better place; only to prevent harm. the organization may not make rules that categorically constrain the freedom of members when a tax would accomplish the goal. Such a tax must not be unreasonable.
for example of the second: the laws adopted in some present-day jurisdictions against incandescent light bulbs would not be allowed, because a similar thing could be accomplished by levying a tax on incandescent light bulbs, or on electricity.
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individuals cannot sell any equity or securitized component of equity in their primary residence if that would reduce their share of the residence below 50%. individuals cannot use any equity in their primary residence that they cannot sell to secure a loan. Landlords must transfer at least 1/360th of the equity in a home to the renter each month. This equity must include rights to the underlying land, or corresponding portion thereof.
see ideas-political-mandatoryRentToOwn for more details on how this should be done.
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ban chairs from taking on positive, non-meta powers during their time as chair
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should we create a part of the legislature, or the chairs, that can make amendments to the bylaws but cannot vote on substantive issues?
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"Some authors believe that modern law has evolved from a scientific comparison of different Chthonic legal traditions.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic_law
toread: Legal Traditions of the World: Sustainable Diversity in Law Legal Traditions of the World: Sustainable Diversity in Law by Patrick Glenn
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right to organize, right to gather, right to peacefully protest
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high officials, and candidates for such must declare their wealth
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social order is not a goal in itself and it is not a crime to disturb it
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer
fiatjaf 3 days ago
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For people interested in common law and the problems of the State law system, I recommend the articles on the topic by John Hasnas:
THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW, AND FLUID DRIVE: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/NYUFinal.pdf
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praxeologist 3 days ago
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Hasnas is good. Also consider Benson's Customary Law with Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description of a Modern System of Law and Order without State Coercion: http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736841
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the Xeer system suggests some sort of 'sponsor/trust chain' procedure for finding arbiters? but perhaps we could use the bottom-up delegate hierarchy instead?
of course, the keystone of Xeer is collective punishment and dues to one's collective insuring organization, which i don't think we have here.
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should lookup journalists who cover campaign finance and ask them if they have any ideas about how an organization's constitution could lessen big money in politics.
e.g. Ken Vogel:
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should lookup academics who cover campaign finance and ask them if they have any ideas about how an organization's constitution could lessen big money in politics.
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should lookup attorneys and law professors who cover campaign finance and ask them if they have any ideas about how an organization's constitution could lessen big money in politics.
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nonexclusive (sublicensable?) creator's IP rights
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the military shall not do policing, nor shall the police adopt militarized tactics or weaponry
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no noncompetes
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no mandatory certification longer than 100 hours, except for weapons and public safety to uninvolved third parties, eg explosions but not medicine. nonmandatory certs, tho
no corporate personhood, except by default
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who is a good person to give power to?
philosopher-kings who don't seek power would be nice, but if it were known that philosophers are given power how would you objectively discriminate the true philosopher-kings who don't want power from those who do?
mass elections are okay, but they select for ppl who are good at (a) projecting an image that manipulates the tribal emotions of belonging and divisiveness (b) soundbites and looking good. Such people may or may not be good at making decisions.
selection by a committee of previous leaders leads to bureaucrats, people who are good at navigating the personalities and rules in organizational power structures, with skills like consensus-building.
ad-hocracies such as Wikipedia editing select people who are able and willing to spend a lot of time proving their dedication to the project, and who are also skilled at selling themselves to others
people who have a stake in the success of the system may be a good idea.
people who have already run something successful may be a good idea.
people who have knowledge may be a good idea. you could go by popularity among credentialed experts, or a written test. but how do you decide which fields of knowledge are most relevant?
people who can predict events may be a good idea (how would you identify these people? Well, you'd ask them to predict stuff and see how accurate they've been)
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an example of the 'force information disclosure but dont regulate' approach:
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places where you could use the 'force driving-test-like certificates but dont ban victimless crimes' approach:
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mb chambers can force each other to listen to presentations
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hmm, besides ideologue faction leaders (who get power in the hierarchical delegation system), and popularity (who get power in an at-large election), what other sorts of ppl might be want to elect as leaders?
bureaucrats (expert civil servants), predictors, people who maintain the original vision of the organization, popular, factols, ad-hocracy (who spends the most time on it), popular will, rich ppl, sortition
who you really get if you try to get these ppl:
bureaucrats (expert civil servants): the same factional distribution as whoever hires the civil servants
predictors: mb you'd actually get predictors? or mb ppl with inside connections to get information before others?
people who maintain the original vision of the organization: but this decays over time to whoever is chosen as successors
popular people: the rich class who finance the election campaigns
factols: power-hungry extremists
ad-hocracy: busybodies
popular will: kneejerk reactions + the media
rich ppl: you'd actually get rich ppl
sortition: popular will + random chance as to which faction the chosen ppl happen to come from this time
so we already have factols in the legislature and executive and popular people as chairs. Should we switch this? The popular-ppl-in-the-legistlature system has been tried already, and isn't terrible. By contrast, the factol system is untried, and the resemblence with the Soviet Union's Soviets, which were successfully subverted by Stalin's circular flow of power, is not encouraging. I'm not sure but i'm guessing it's better this way, because (a) the factols have thought hard about the issues, (b) the factols are less dependent on campaign money, and on looking good on TV and soundbites, (c) the chairs need all the popular mandate they can get.
so which of those others do we want in the legislature? bureaucrats don't buy us anything new, as noted (although, maybe it would be good to require legistlators to be bureacrats first just to gain experience? but if we do that, then isn't it true that either the ppl are directly electing ministers, which we were trying to avoid, or the bureaucrats are being chosen by the old leadership, closing any path for the people to elect an outsider? hmm since we already have layers of indirection, maybe this is ok; maybe say that the Board members may directly vote on the PM/CEO, and on choices for ministers, but must delegate their policy votes to a single person who used to be a civil servant, or minister, or PM, of their choice (and may un-delegate at will? or not?).
predictors: yes, i think we want these. In PieTrust?, could add prediction success to the formula for the 22%
people who maintain the original vision of the organization: no, because this decays over time to whoever is chosen as successors. the Seed mechanism is enough.
popular people: no, the Chairs are good enough
ad-hocracy: already have these in the Juries
popular will: already have in the forum
rich ppl: no, they will get enough power some way or another as it is, and in my company ideas also we have some votes for investors already
sortion: no, the Forum is good enough; and, too random.
could have 7 ppl on board, 3/3/1, where 3 are factols, 3 are at-large popular voting, and 1 is sortiton out of the independent (ie nonpartisan or at least unregistered), nonvoting eligble-voters. but no, for the reasons above.
could have 4 factol seats and the 5th seat could be a predictor, predictor goodness could be mean/std^2 (inspired by the Kelly criterion in a Gaussian setting); or look at http://www.goodjudgmentproject.com/ and similar studies to find the best formula http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22D11PC20058+OR+D11PC20059+OR+D11PC20060+OR+D11PC20061+OR+D11PC20062%22&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C47&as_sdtp= , bayesian truth serum, etc or u could just keep the system the same, and give the predictors votes
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the reason it would be very good to have some good predictors in there is that predictors have a realistic view as to what is possible and what the actual, not intended, effect of actions will be
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need to prevent the Chairs from just being ignored by the police and military.
Military and police are sworn to not take action when vetoed by a chair.
Chair can fire any minister or general (or maybe any civil servant or soldier?).
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right to declare 'restructuring': at any time, a person can voluntarily convert all of their debt into equity against their future income (at some organization-mandated rate?) (they will get a black mark on their credit record, of course)
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right of first refusal for debt: if a creditor sells a debtor's debt, the debtor has a 'right of first refusal' to buy it at the price sold. The way this must be done is: the buyer must first agree to buy the debt at the given price in the case that the debtor doesn't take the right of first refusal offer. Then the debtor is given the chance to buy it. Debt cannot be bought in exchange for non-publicaly-traded goods, e.g. goods that the debtor cannot get their hands on easily (e.g. you can't tell them they can only buy their debt in exchange for '500 shares of this private company's stock')
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outside private-style audit
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no unfunded mandates
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govm't specific: limit on spending on standing military as % of GDP, limit on administrative overhead as % of GDP
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time limit on emergencies; if you want a longer emergency, should it be the same rules as a war?
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govm't can do: crime prevention, emergency services, taxation, military, antimonopoly and antimonosony, recognition of local governments, direct redistribution of wealth and capital, taxation, regulation of public commons, funding the development of public goods, regulations to force disclosure/transparency,
if land-based (sovereign) then immigration, and support/regulation of utilities
some banned activities: direct services other than those above, active 'regulation' of economic activity (eg by deciding how much money to print), bleessing a single authority for banned activities (eg a single currency), transfer of wealth with strings attached, regulation of morality/victimless crimes other than mandating transparency
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abolish copyright, trade secrets, and also make it illegal to discriminate in hiring or firing based on release of such information to the public (eg you cant fire or refuse to hire or promote someone just because they released your company's secret algorithm/invention)
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how to do basic income, but prevent: (1) ppl getting the basic income but feeling aggrieved, spending all their time plotting how to screw things up for others (2) a majority of ppl living on the basic income voting it up (3) ppl being angry at rich ppl who still get the basic income ?
(1) dont give services, just money; that way ppl living on the basic income wont be 'stuck' with bad govm't provided housing, services, etc. (2) allow ppl to reject the basic income, and have a rule that ppl who accept basic income can't vote on the level of the basic income (3) perhaps try to make it cool not to accept the basic income; what kind of status perks can the govmt bestow that would not be unjust? mb (a) 'citizen' title, (b) right to vote on level of basic income (c) ??? what else? you could just not give the basic income to rich ppl too. but need to have very low marginal rate, e.g. for a rate of 10%, someone making almost 10x the basic income would still be getting a little bit of it
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party http://democracyos.org/
" The Protocol to hold their leaders accountable also relies on the internet. It is called "Wheel of mass" and it is a collective interview, in writing, in which any may ask questions to representatives, who answer wherever they are. Most visited mass wheel was Pablo Iglesias, Secretary General of can, with more than 2800 comments, live.
So far no has been exposed nothing too innovative, section "crowdfunding" ("collective financing") from his official site (www.podemos.info) shows us the most interesting thing that you can see in this matter, around the world. We can is a political party that finances everything collectively, from your website. Thus, for example, we know that you for your event's presentation, "subsidiary" Burjassot (Valencia) needed to raise 637 euros. He got them, few days ago, from voluntary and individual crowdfunding through internet.
Cases like the Burjassot there are thousands, the power of this mechanism to obtain, organize and transparent resources allows them to sustain their slogan "popular candidates and citizens without bank loans". We can crowdfunding owes from rental of its supporters premises until their famous van.
The operation of the "crowdfunding" is impressive, but the big bet of can is the use of web platforms to give voice to their bases citizens. The enormous challenge that passes for organizing a conversation of many with many embarked. Its square, the square we can, great, traveled on an average day by nearly 10,000 people, is also digital.
We decided to use the internet to build a plural dialogue and appeal to what they call, in a way confusing and ambiguous, "collective intelligence". To do so, are based in 3 applications: Reddit (to share text, links, videos), Appgree (for consensus) and AgoraVoting? (to vote).
From these platforms, simple and interesting, they stimulate hundreds of conversations about politics, organized thousands of interactions and ensure a fairly shielded identification system, with code verified with the phone. However, their segmentation tools separate isolated experience: seems that debates on one side, remember in another vote in another.
In this digital dispersion, users make a little bit of everything (discuss, agree, voting) in each application, unless you are worth the same vote on Reddit than on AgoraVoting?. In the end, don't know who is on what platform, or means if at issue in networks is channeled or is lost. In addition, the levels of information are variable: they are sometimes overwhelming, sometimes they are hidden behind an algorithm. Nor is there, in any of their platforms, a scheme of horizontal delegations.
But, above all, activity in networks is not formally tied to decisions that can effective representatives (MEPs elected) taken in Brussels. There is can a system that gives popular origin to their vote in the European Parliament. In this way, online deliberation is divorced from the formal political testimony. And this is an Achilles heel, because the key in politics are not the proclamations, or poetry, nor good words but guarantees. And, at this point, we can not give them.
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Facebook used to have a governance policy that allowed users to have a binding vote. However, their procedure required a quorum of 30% of users (otherwise the results were 'advisory'). They didn't get this, so there was a proposal to take this power away from users. Less than 1% voted, allowing the company to take away the binding vote:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-governance/our-site-governance-vote/10152304778295301
Note: they say 668,872 people voted out of a 'user community of more than one billion'. 668872/1000000000 = 0.000668872 . That's about 0.07%.
Clearly, typical quorum rules don't work well in this regime.
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how could one have a jury selection process while maintaining 'trial by your peers'; in many disputes, you'd want someone familiar with a certain industry or technology as your 'peer'.
jury selection ideas: defense can request a certain number of jurors with certain professions or skills or expertise. prosecution cannot ask for randomly selected jurors to be removed. (but if the defense can pick some juror attributes, and dismiss some randomly chosen jurors, and the prosecution can do neither, it sounds like the defense has a lot of power -- is this too much? maybe not give any preemptory dismissals, only dismissals for cause?)
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one analysis of why Greece has problems with tax compliance:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010
" In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
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Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
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“In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.” ... “The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”
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tax fraud -- which was so common in Greece that it wasn’t worth writing about
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the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”
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The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.
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The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” But, I say, if some plastic surgeon takes a million in cash, buys a plot on a Greek island, and builds himself a villa, there would be other records—say, building permits. “The people who give the building permits don’t inform the Treasury,” says the tax collector. In the apparently not-so-rare cases where the tax cheat gets caught, he can simply bribe the tax collector and be done with it. There are, of course, laws against tax collectors’ accepting bribes, explained the collector, “but if you get caught, it can take seven or eight years to get prosecuted. So in practice no one bothers.”
...
The systematic lying about one’s income had led the Greek government to rely increasingly on taxes harder to evade: real-estate and sales taxes. Real estate is taxed by formula—to take the tax collectors out of the equation—which generates a so-called “objective value” for each home. The boom in the Greek economy over the last decade caused the actual prices at which property changed hands to far outstrip the computer-driven appraisals. Given higher actual sales prices, the formula is meant to ratchet upward. The typical Greek citizen responded to the problem by not reporting the price at which the sale took place, but instead reporting a phony price—which usually happened to be the same low number at which the dated formula had appraised it. If the buyer took out a loan to buy the house, he took out a loan for the objective value and paid the difference in cash, or with a black-market loan. As a result the “objective values” grotesquely understate the actual land values. Astonishingly, it’s widely believed that all 300 members of the Greek Parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value. Or, as both the tax collector and a local real-estate agent put it to me, “every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”
On he went, describing a system that was, in its way, a thing of beauty. It mimicked the tax-collecting systems of an advanced economy—and employed a huge number of tax collectors—while it was in fact rigged to enable an entire society to cheat on their taxes. As he rose to leave, he pointed out that the waitress at the swanky tourist hotel failed to provide us with a receipt for our coffees. “There’s a reason for that,” he said. “Even this hotel doesn’t pay the sales tax it owes.”
...
The first was an Athenian construction company that had built seven giant apartment buildings and sold off nearly 1,000 condominiums in the heart of the city. Its corporate tax bill honestly computed came to 15 million euros, but the company had paid nothing at all. Zero. To evade taxes it had done several things. First, it never declared itself a corporation; second, it employed one of the dozens of companies that do nothing but create fraudulent receipts for expenses never incurred and then, when the tax collector stumbled upon the situation, offered him a bribe. The tax collector blew the whistle and referred the case to his bosses—whereupon he found himself being tailed by a private investigator, and his phones tapped. In the end the case was resolved, with the construction company paying 2,000 euros.
...
In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former M.P. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a magazine article.
The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.
The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.
...
But this question of whether Greece will repay its debts is really a question of whether Greece will change its culture, and that will happen only if Greeks want to change. I am told 50 times if I am told once that what Greeks care about is “justice” and what really boils the Greek blood is the feeling of unfairness. Obviously this distinguishes them from no human being on the planet, and ignores what’s interesting: exactly what a Greek finds unfair. It’s clearly not the corruption of their political system. It’s not cheating on their taxes, or taking small bribes in their service to the state. No: what bothers them is when some outside party—someone clearly different from themselves, with motives apart from narrow and easily understood self-interest—comes in and exploits the corruption of their system. Enter the monks.
...
In a society that has endured something like total moral collapse, its monks had somehow become the single universally acceptable target of moral outrage. Every right-thinking Greek citizen is still furious with them and those who helped them, and yet no one knows exactly what they did, or why.
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Despite its entry into the European Union, Greece has remained a closed economy; it’s impossible to put one finger on the source of all the country’s troubles, but if you laid a hand on them, one finger would touch its insularity. "
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no prosecutorial or police discretion against govmt officials inclding police eg cops and their families arent allowed to speed when offduty eg anticorruption charges against govmt officials cannot be dropped
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i've heard from ppl that some sources of corruption in highly corrupt countries are:
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The law has a kind of OCD-spectrum character, to the detriment of the defendant. By which i mean, when a human is living their life, they really do have to be paranoid about a small chance of accidentally doing something illegal and getting in big trouble, because the law operates mechanically in a very binary sense, eg one seemingly inconsequential action or phrasing can have a large legal consequence, also the law cares more about following procedure than about whether you are a good or bad person; so in order to comply with the law, a human has to engage in the sort of thinking that is normally associated with the OCD spectrum, trying to consciously analyze seemingly minor details and being paranoid about improbable bad events.
I dont know quite how to fix this but it would be good to fix it if it could be fixed. If making the law less OCD would increase false negatives, then leave it in only when dealing with people in the govm't, probably only govm't high officials, and when dealing with corruption.
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i've noticed that even some law-and-order type people who support the idea of victimless, nonviolent appear revolted when a nice-seeming person goes to jail for decades for them; they opine that what they want is seizure of ill-gotten gains, and monetary fines, and community service, and that they'd like to reserve long jail terms for violent criminals. So maybe prohibit jail and similar punishments except for violent crimes.
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Confessions of a congressman 9 secrets from the inside http://www.vox.com/2015/2/5/7978823/congress-secrets
"sometimes, the things they think will fix Congress — like making us come home every weekend — actually break it further.
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1) Congress is not out of touch with folks back home
Congress is only a part-time job in Washington, DC. An hour after the last vote, almost everyone is on the airplane home. Congress votes fewer than 100 days a year, spending the rest of the time back home where we pander to their constituents' short-term interests, not the long-term good of the nation. Anyone who is closer to your district than you are will replace you. Incumbents stick to their districts like Velcro.
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2) Congress listens best to money
It is more lucrative to pander to big donors than to regular citizens. Campaigns are so expensive that the average member needs a million-dollar war chest every two years and spends 50 percent to 75 percent of their term in office raising money.
...
3) Almost everyone in Congress loves gerrymandering
Without crooked districts, most members of Congress probably would not have been elected. According to the Cook Political Report, only about 90 of the 435 seats in Congress are "swing" seats that can be won by either political party. ... The only threat a lot of us incumbents face is in the primaries, where someone even more extreme than we are can turn out the vote among an even smaller, more self-selected group of partisans.
4) You have no secret ballot anymore
The only way political parties can successfully gerrymander is by knowing how you vote. ... we don't know exactly whom you voted for, but we get pretty damn close. We know exactly which primaries and general elections you have voted in, and since there are so few realistic candidates in most elections, down or up ballot, we might as well know exactly who you voted for. Marry that data with magazine subscriptions, the kind of car you drive, and all sorts of other easily available consumer information ...
5) We don't have a Congress but a parliament
Over the last several decades, party loyalty has increased to near-unanimity. If a member of Congress doesn't vote with his or her party 99 percent of the time, he's considered unreliable and excluded from party decision-making. Gone are the days when you were expected to vote your conscience and your district, the true job of a congressperson. Parliaments only work because they have a prime minister who can get things done. We have a parliament without any ability to take executive action. We should not be surprised we are gridlocked.
...
6) Congressional committees are a waste of time
With parliamentary voting, control is centralized in each party's leadership. Almost every major decision is made by the Speaker or Minority Leader, not by committees. They feel it is vital to party success to have a national "message" that is usually poll-driven, not substantive. So why develop any expertise as a committee member if your decisions will only be overridden by party leadership? Why try to get on a good committee if you have already ceded authority to your unelected, unaccountable party leaders? The result is members routinely don't show up at committee hearings, or if they do show up, it's only to ask a few questions and leave. A lot of members fight for committees that will help them raise money or get a sweet lobbying job later (more on that in a minute). The result is that the engine for informed lawmaking is broken.
...
7) Congress is a stepping-stone to lobbying
Congress is no longer a destination but a journey. Committee assignments are mainly valuable as part of the interview process for a far more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist. You are considered naïve if you are not currying favor with wealthy corporations under your jurisdiction. It's become routine to see members of Congress drop their seat in Congress like a hot rock when a particularly lush vacancy opens up. The revolving door is spinning every day. Special interests deplete Congress of its best talent.
...
8)The best people don't run for Congress
Smart people figured this out years ago and decided to pursue careers other than running for Congress. The thought of living in a fishbowl with 30-second attack ads has made Congress repulsive to spouses and families. The idea of spending half your life begging rich people you don't know for money turns off all reasonable, self-respecting people. That, plus lower pay than a first-year graduate of a top law school, means that Congress, like most federal agencies, is not attracting the best and the brightest in America.
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9) Congress is still necessary to save America, and cynics aren't helping
... Get over your nostalgia: Congress has never been more than a sausage factory. The point here isn't to make us something we're not. The point is to get us to make sausage again.
"
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some point out that if everyone can vote directly on issues, the majority would have no incentive vote not to take money from the rich even if that is unfair, or unproductive in the long run.
note that i'm not saying it's a bad thing to take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Maybe that a good thing, in fact i suspect that it is. But here i'm just looking at strategic voting here; we don't want a system in which that is what ends up happening even in situations where it's generally agreed that it's not a good idea.
one response is to say, whatever, that obviously hasn't happened, so it must only be a danger in theory. But today the world mostly only has representative democracies, since i'm trying to push for more direct democracy, i still have to worry about it. In addition, it could be that proper campaign finance reform would make this sort of thing more of a danger.
one idea would be to have a special kind of voting that ONLY applies to setting taxes. in this special voting only used for taxes, voting strength would be proportional to taxes paid. there would also be a rule that in no case can the taxes be set so that a significant number of the poor tend to pay more tax than a significant number of the rich (and even a single one of the richest rich is a 'significant number'). Note that even in this system Mr. Gates can't unilaterally vote his taxes to zero, because as long as his taxes are less than 50% of all taxes collected, he is in the minority. Similarly for any coalition of the rich; until they are paying more than half of the total tax burden, they can't vote down their own taxes unilaterally. Again, i emphasize that personally i think it may be a good idea to tax the rich and give money to the poor, and that this rule is not intended to prevent that; it's only intended to limit that to a degree that people think is both fair and productive.
an interpolation between constant strength and strength proportional to taxes paid would be strength proportional to ln(taxes paid/median taxes paid) or (better, as not subject to lockout by reducing the tax rate of the poor) ln(taxes paid/median income). For example, the median income in the USA is around $50k and Bill Gates probably makes on the order of $1billion per year, a difference of 20000x, so that would give Gates just 10 votes. Since there are very few rich people, this probably wouldn't make a difference in outcomes, and it's more complex than constant strength. Another thing you could do is take the n-th root of the proportion instead of the log, let's start with sqrt; sqrt(20000) = 141. Again, that doesn't make much of a difference. What would that do to the power of the "1%"ers? In the US, the top 1% of incomes is around $300k, which is about 6x the median of $50k, and sqrt(6) is about 2.5; so it would turn 1% of the vote into about 2.5% of the vote, again, not much of a difference. so if you had already decided to have a system in which strength of voting on tax rate increased with taxes paid, it would probably make sense for it to be proportional, otherwise, you may as well not have such a system and have a constant strength.
should 'taxes paid' be over the previous year or cumulative?
note that in an organization without a broad base, such as a small nonprofit setting dues rate via 'dues paid' could in fact allow a small coalition to set the due rate to 0 for everybody! in this case the organization would have to rely on interest from the dues previously paid until they could collect enough donations from due-raise-supporters to equal the amount already paid by the coalition, and raise dues. Therefore an organization of this sort might want to have it in their bylaws that dues go to an endowment, and spending is only from interest. clearly that wouldnt make as much sense in a for-profit startup, where the investors 'by default' set the 'dues rate' to 0 (eg the dilution rate), and they only raise it when they feel like it. This makes sense in that context because the same people voting on that are voting on everything else, with the same voting weight (by shares owned); but here we are considering organizations in which the faction with the most votes isn't necessarily identical to the faction who pays the most dues.
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also, again, how do we prevent gangs from forcing ppl to join their constituency?
what we would like is a way to prevent anyone from proving to anyone else which constituency they are in.
but this implies that they can't speak at meetings, because then they could stenographically encode proof that they know a certain password, which is tied to their real-world identity, etc.
or, allow everyone to speak at the meetings, even those who aren't members.
one problem with this is that, in order to disguish the membership of the constituency from itself, we can't allow it to have its own parliamentary procedure.
well wait a minute, yes we can. All we have to do is to keep the central list of who actually supports the constitutencies secret.
but then they can't protect themselves from voters from other constituencies who vote for dumb things.
and if we allow them to run their own votes against the central list (eg a central computer discards votes from ppl not in the constituency), then they can arrange procedures like 'only Mr. Smith votes yes; take the vote; no one voted yes! mr. smith isn't really in our constituency!' and then if they're a gang, kill mr. smith.
so mb we can't actually allow each constituency to run itself. that's a shame. now we have to worry more about the Stalin problem (where central control of constituency parliamentary procedure allow the central govmt to lock out the opposition by centrally nominating candidates, etc). I guess we just have to be very strict in the bylaws that the central govmt cannot do anything to actually influence the choices of the constituencies, even if it can determine parliamentary procedure. The central govmt must design the parliamentary procedure with limits on how many votes it can have, etc, to prevent the Mr. Smith enumeration (this is somewhat tough because you can use binary search to identify some ppl with log n votes).
also, this means that you must disallow really small constituencies, because if there is only 3 ppl in the constituency you can run the 'only mr. smith votes' procedure even using a normal parliamentary procedure with # of votes limits, etc.
this leads to a real problem in eg a small company using the system, where your boss or your boss's boss will want you to vote for her, but the constituencies are small.
also note that if Mr. Smith has a friend that he can trust, the friend can vote for him.
Note that votes during real-time in-person meetings can't be allowed, b/c then ppl can just look at each others' screens or keyboard or whatever. So the period to vote must be at least a day for each vote.
i think that this (running all votes through a central computer; limiting the frequency of votes; having at least a one-day voting period for each vote before any counts are returned; having strict statuatory limits that say that votes can never be used to try to identify or even demographically survey constituents, and also that the government cant try to influence who or what the constituencies vote for) is probably good enough to prevent most gang-ish corruption of the type described here, and most of the stalin-ish nomination control.
note however that if the constituency of supporters is private, then we can't do the thing where we partition consensus councils among the parties
but wait, let's just only allow elected reps to be on councils. Not the board members, but even the reps of first-level constituencies.
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in the bylaws that dues go to an endowment, and spending is only from interest
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so here's another flawed government, what was the flaw? was it structural or otherwise?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Directory
it fits in with my theory that once you start killing members of losing factions, those in power, even if formerly idealistic, will stop at nothing to hold onto it
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interesting idea from Plato's Republic: the rulers have no property
in Plato's Republic, future rulers are trained from birth. But perhaps you could have elected officeholders who voluntarily give up all of their possessions?
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police cannot investigate themselves (an independent special prosecutor (not the DA) must
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often you hear of laws that ppl working in a related industry think are stupid.
perhaps we should inject some deference to expertise into the council system.
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APIs, and anything else necessary to enable interoperability, aren't copyrightable
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no prosecutorial discretion against police, prosecutors, high officials (including anyone who is boss of police or prosecutors, or their boss, etc) (eg prosecutors must indict if they can), except:
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failure of cost-benefit analysis, rather than just causation, necessary to find guilt. Eg if a doctor prescribes a vaccine, and the vaccine has a side effect that hurts the patient, but the court finds that the risk-weighted cost-benefit analysis of giving the vaccine was favorable, then the doctor is not to blame for the side effect.
perhaps this defence is only available if you accept the causation, however, to reduce the incentive to lie about the causation
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the right for someone charged with political crimes to make any defense they want (eg apparently currently in the US, someone charged with revealing classified information is entirely prohibited from arguing before the jury that the programs were unlawful, immoral, or otherwise wrongful)
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this guy argues that even congressional votes should be secret ballot, not public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY
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design and power: one of the fundamental aspects of design (Kurt's contraction phase) is saying 'no' (steve jobs quote on innovation; Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote on nothing left to take away); but groups of peers tend towards consensus ('yes, and'; see quote by Arsenios); therefore, best to have only one or a few peers note: its sufficient for this power to be project-specific; eg joel's MS story http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html
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in some jurisdictions currently, you are not supposed to forcibly resist police who eg reach for a camera, even if them confiscating your camera is illegal. This will pose a problem when technology allows police to scan your mind without your consent; an application of this sort of rule would not allow you to forcibly resist such a scan even if illegal; the idea that you cannot forcibly resist is therefore predicated on really bad things simply being impossible. It is already having trouble with things like police scanning eg BTC private keys, which (given the frequency in which even private information in courts is illegally leaked) will probably lead to lots of money being stolen.
however, i cannot currently think of a better system. Allowing suspects to forcibly resist the police would make the police's job more dangerous and difficult for little gain, as many innocent suspects would not win a contest of might against the police anyways.
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no torture
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your mind and your body are your own
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one suggestion i've heard or thought about sometimes is, when some law targets some strict subset of the voters, to only let those voters vote, eg:
but otoh clearly you wouldn't want:
is there a way to draft a provision here that captures what we want?
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could prohibit retroactive elongation of term
eg if you extend terms of office or cancel or loosen term limits, these loosening of restrictions can't apply to any of the incumbents
(but when you impose additional term limits, you CAN grandfather the incumbents; this is allowed b/c it makes it more politically feasible to impose term limits)
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not sure about this but maybe:
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no death penalty
not for moral reasons, but pragmatic; examples such as the french revolution show that if you someone is threatened with death if they should lose power, then even many people who seem like they might ordinarily be reasonable will kill to keep power
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allow cartel organization for the sole purpose of reducing spending on advertising and legal stuff
(or more generally, reducing an activity that is not helpful to customers and which only needs to be done for the sake of competition)
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if you were uncomfortable with a simple majority on the Board being equivalent to the 3/5th majority needed to do something, then could give the CEO a vote on the Board (for a total of 6 Board votes, not 5); if the CEO is also a Board member by virtue of hierarchical delegation, then e would get 2 seats. Then make the voting threshold for Board business 2/3s (= 4/6s) rather than 3/5. Of course, when voting to replace the CEO (or whether to sanction the CEO, or on CEO pay, or on executive officier compensation (a superset of CEO pay), etc), the CEO vote does not count.
this might have the added benefit of encouraging coalition formation in a similar way to the way that eg Greece gives the leading faction in an election some bonus seats in the legislature. i'm not 100% sure if this is really equivalent though, there might be some detail that changes the game-theoretic dynamics here.
i'm not sure if this would really make things more consensus-y; if the CEO is a Board member too, and if the other Board members are split 2 to 2, then whichever side the CEO joins becomes 4 vs 2, and 4/6 is the 2/3s threshold. By the same token, i'm not sure if this would increase stability, because again, only one person (the CEO) must change their mind to flip policy 180-degrees (two non-CEOs would have to flip though). What it would do is significantly increase the power of the CEO vs the other board members (and thru that, would probably increase stability; also, the CEO is the only single person who could change policy 180-degrees through changing their mind).
also, remember that the CEO would 'own' the space in between the 4/6 pro and the 4/6 con in which the Board cant take action either way, because in that case the CEO is mostly free to do what they want
by empowering the CEO so much, this might make the CEO position too valuable of a peach, causing factions to fight in order to achieve it; one problem that was suggested as behind the instability of Presidential as opposed to Prime Ministerial systems.
2 Board members which did not include the CEO would still not be sufficient to block action by everyone else.
so i dont like this. it empowers the CEO too much.
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but it would be nice to prevent a mere 3/5 Board (a single vote) from overruling the CEO.
so how about giving the CEO just half a vote?
now 3/5.5 < 60%; 3.5/5.5 > 60%; 4/5.5 > 60%; so this would give us the desired effect of allowing the CEO to block a slim 3/5s majority again em, while still allowing a 4/5 majority to overrule the CEO.
if the CEO is also a Board member, then a switch would change it from 3.5 vs 2 to 2 vs 3.5; so the CEO can still reverse policy by 180-degrees with a switch. 2 board members opposed to the CEO still couldn't block em (3.5 vs 2)
how about a quarter vote?
3/5.25 < 60%; 3.25 / 5.25 > 60%; 4/5.25 > 60%; so two board members still arent enough to oppose the CEO.
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so, another thing we could do is just say that the CEO decides, for each ordinary Board decision except those affecting the choice, compensation, or limitations on or disciplining of the CEO, whether this Board decision shall be 60% or 66% (eg where the bylaws say 66% the CEO cannot reduce it to 60%, but where they say 60% the CEO can increase to 66%)
thus the CEO can cause a 3/5 majority against em to be impotent; but cannot fight a 4/5 majority against em
the practical effects are similar though; if the CEO has a Board seat and changes their mind against an evenly split board, this can go from 3/5 one way to 3/5 the other way
i guess that makes sense b/c if the CEO is on the board and the board is otherwise evenly split, there will always be a faction of 2 against em, so one cannot easily empower a faction of 2 to block in this case without making the voting threshold 66% throughout.
my first guess is: 50% if reducing spending, reducing dues, protecting liberties, simplifying (shortening legislative text, except where the Court unanimously objects that it is not simpler), vetoing other branches, or if the CEO cannot make a decision unilaterally in the absence of Board input 66% otherwise
todo think about this more.
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not 'copyright', 'publicationright' (pubright)
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it would be nice to have strong enough copyright (pubright) to prevent ppl from just blatently copying and ripping off others, while weakening derivative work protection sufficiently to allow mass culture to be public property?
for example, if someone makes a movie, then you wouldn't be allowed to just pirate that movie. However, you would be allowed to write a book with characters from the movie, to name things after stuff in the movie, to film your own 'reboot' of the movie's story, to sell merchandise based on the movie etc. BUT if you sell these things, a cut of the proceeds goes back to the original author. The amount of the cut is statuatory, cannot be more than 1/3 of revenue in any case, and does NOT increase if you derive from multiple prior works (instead, the same fixed cut is split in some way between these works).
here's some suggestions on how that could be accomplished:
there is a tension between the previous two principals; where does one draw the line where a protected 'inexact copy' becomes an unprotected 'derivative work'? I propose a standard based on 4 things:
instead of sticking with these principals in a vague way, it would be preferable to develop specific criteria to know exactly when a derived work is allowed. Some of those are hard to measure ("culture"?) but some are easy (inexactness). So there will be a bright line based on the exact ones that says a derived work is definitely allowed, and if a deriver doesnt meet those criteria then a deriver can always hope that a court finds in your favor based on the hard to measure ones.
now about trademarks:
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exception to 'minimal law': it's okay for the law to contain default contract terms. Like a software library, this saves everyone time by not having to incorporate those terms, or ones like it, into private contracts.
however, as an implementation detail, i would clearly separate such terms into "default contracts", separate from other parts of law. For example, the Delaware Corporation Code does NOT do it the way i want; they intersperse the details into other parts of the law (eg they interperse optional defaults with compulsory laws). I'm saying, (a) the defaults should be broken out into their own section, and (b) the defaults should be presented in the form of a 'default contract'
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my formula for hierarchical delegation constitutency sizes allows the representation of roughly this many voters if the Board size is 2:
and this many if the Board size is 5:
i compute these as: cumprod(2(arange(10))) cumprod(5(arange(10)))
but i guess another formula is:
p^((n^2 - n)/2) (or equivalently p^(n(n-1)/2))
where p is the Board size
the other day i was thinking of software complexity, and the question of when to add a middle layer to a software system to decouple it; more generally, for a very large system, how many layers?
eg in modern PCs we have ISA (assembly language), C, operating systems, HLLs, application frameworks, applications. The lower layers serve very many (indirect?) 'constitutents', eg a ton of ppl use the x86 ISA, slightly less use C, slightly less use GNU/Linux, a small portion of those use Python, a small portion of those use Django.
so i wondered what a formula would be for how many layers such a system should have, as a function of the total number of people using the system. Eg from the number of ppl using x86 ISA computers, can you get the number 6, the number of layers above?
so the first thought is, take the log; but that gives too many layers. then i thought, hey my delegate constituencies seems to grow at about the right rate. And it's trying to solve a similar problem, when you think about it. (note: to get the number of layer, find the index of the first term in your sequence greater than your number of users/voters)
note that when p = 2 ( http://oeis.org/A006125 ), this is the same as:
"Number of graphs on n labeled nodes; also number of outcomes of labeled n-team round-robin tournaments."
related ideas: have the size of each constitutency grow as the square of the previous one, instead of just multiplying by p on each step:
cumprod(5, 25, 625, 390625, .. p^(2^i))
cumprod(5(2arange(10)))
5, 125, 78125, 30517578125, 8033366502585570893,
related ideas: have the size of each constitutency grow by multiplying consecutive primes, rather than p (that is, the constitutency sizes are primorial numbers http://oeis.org/A002110 , written p(i)#, where i is the sequence index, and p is just 'p', not any particular prime):
cumprod(1, 2, 3*2, 5*3*2, 7*5*3*2, 11*7*5*3*2) 1, 2, 12, 360, 75600, 174636000,
this sequence is the "Chernoff sequence", which i've previously encountered when learning about highly composite numbers and similar things (i'm surprised that this isnt labeled a 'core sequence' in OEIS):
if you start with eg 3 instead of 2, what do you get?
cumprod(3, 5*3, 7*5*3, 11*7*5*3)
the sequence on the inside is the primorials with the first term skipped (second term if you count '1' as the first term), and the other terms divided by 2:
http://oeis.org/A070826 "One half of product of first n primes"
if you start with 5 instead, then presumably it's 1/6 of the product of the first n primes, with the initial terms that would be less than 1 (non-integers) omitted:
[5, 7*5, 11*7*5, 13*11*7*5,17*13*11*7*5, 19*17*13*11*7*5, 23*19*17*13*11*7*5, 29*23*19*17*13*11*7*5,] [5, 35, 385, 5005, 85085, 1616615, 37182145, 1078282205]
(this sequence is not in OEIS)
anyway now let's put back the cumprods:
cumprod of http://oeis.org/A070826 is cumprod(3, 5*3, 7*5*3, 11*7*5*3):
3, 45, 4725, 5457375
(not in OEIS)
so as expected, this is just something similar to the Chernoff sequence that grows a little faster.
i wonder if the 'perfect' hierarchical delegation governance system would just start with a Board of 2 rather than 5 at the top, then have 6 at the next level down, etc (ie primorial constituency sizes, http://oeis.org/A002110 )?
note: another way of getting '5' for the first one instead of 2 would be to take the primorials but then subtract 1 from them: http://oeis.org/A057588 :
1, 5, 29, 209, 2309, 30029, 510509, 9699689, 223092869, 6469693229, 200560490129
compare to my current idea of just having the constituency sizes be multiples of 5s:
1, 5, 29, 209, 2309, 30029, 510509, 9699689, 223092869, 6469693229 (primorials - 1)vs
1, 5, 25, 125, 625, 3125, 15625, 78125, 390625, 1953125
cumprods are:
(not in OEIS)vs http://oeis.org/A109345
1, 5, 145, 30305, 69974245, 2101256603105, 1072710407194530445,vs 1, 5, 125, 15625, 9765625, 30517578125, 476837158203125,
the factorization pattern of the cumprod of the primorials - 1 is somewhat interesting:
bshanks@bshanks:/tmp$ factor 145 145: 5 29 bshanks@bshanks:/tmp$ factor 30305 30305: 5 11 19 29 bshanks@bshanks:/tmp$ factor 69974245 69974245: 5 11 19 29 2309 bshanks@bshanks:/tmp$ factor 2101256603105 2101256603105: 5 11 19 29 2309 30029 bshanks@bshanks:/tmp$ factor 1072710407194530445 1072710407194530445: 5 11 19 29 61 2309 8369 30029
in terms of population of voters:
the US has about 300 cities with population > 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population ; smaller populations are not counted
so i dunno how to think about 16k vs 30k.
the smallest number in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States#Employment_by_Major_Industry_Sector_in_United_States is 17500, and there are a few ~20ks in there also
the number of employees of the largest employers in the world is ~2-3million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
the largest cities in the world have about 20 million ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population ) and the largest metro areas have about 40 million ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agglomerations_by_population ). So using multiples of 5 gives 5 layers to these large cities (same as for the whole earth), whereas using primorials minus 1 gives only 4 layers.
compare to Chernoff:
1, 2, 12, 360, 75600, 174636000, 5244319080000
Chernoff gives 5 layers to all cities over ~75k, but needs 6 layers for the Earth as a whole
perhaps one way we could get something like Chernoff - 1 is my old idea of allowing x constitutencies in theory, but only if everyone voted and aligned perfectly into constituencies, which wouldn't happen most of the time, so usually x-1 would be the practical limit (what if full voting and alignment does happen some of the time, and then we have deadlocks? i wouldn't worry too much; either we have a large multilayer system, in which case this state is fragile/unstable and the pressure of the deadlock will probably cause alignment to break, or we have a small group with full participation, in which case they can work it out; however i would prefer a system that makes this impossible)
now otoh bigger is not always better; might WANT to stay comfortably below Dunbar's # for smaller groups, and at 6 million instead of 70 million for larger (eg the population of Ireland is under 6 million)
---
5 can be jusified as follows:
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now as to my old problem of how/whether to force hierarchical delegation on demogauges who personally could get a zillion ppl to vote for them directly, but otoh in corporations dont want to force large shareholders to go thru intermediaries: the motivation here is to have collegial meetings. So instead of having a limit on the voting power that one person can control, just limit the number of ppl that can be in one mtng.
so eg if we are using powers of 5, and there were 1000 people in the group, you'd say:
"The power of the delegate of a constiutency should be limited by the number of votes indirectly delegated to them (these are counted in the obvious way). But also, the quality of delegation goes up as the number of direct constituents goes down. Therefore, the number of votes held by (the power of) a delegate of a constituency is also capped in an inverse manner to the constituency's size. In particular, in order to hold more than 1000/125 = 8 delegated votes, a delegate must have no more than 25 people in their (direct) constituency (if the 1000 person group were split into constituencies of 25 each, there would be 40 such). The 5 people with the most held votes are on the Board."
this leads to indirect constituencies: ppl might start out splitting into 40 groups of 25 each, but then only 5 of these groups' delegates would be on the Board, and the other 35 groups cant merge directly, so their delegates would merge.
now can we generalize this rule and make it smoother, rather than relying on an integer sequence such as:
1, 5, 25, 125, 625 (cumprod: 1, 5, 125, 15625, 9765625, 30517578125, 476837158203125)
?
with that sequence we're saying:
so in general,
equivalently,
cumprod(5^i, where i ranges from 1 to x)
now we have a formula that admits fractional x.
eg in Python we can graph:
n = 1000 x = arange(1,4,0.1) direct_constituency_size = 5.x indirect_constituency_votes = n/5.((x2 - x)/2.)
at some point the number of allowed indirect_constituency_votes get smaller than the direct_constituency_size, there's no point going further than that:
direct_constituency_size = indirect_constituency_votes 5^x = n/5^((x^2 - x)/2) log5(5^x) = log5(n/5^((x^2 - x)/2)) x = log5(n) - log5(5^((x^2 - x)/2)) x = log5(n) - (x^2 - x)/2 x = log5(n) - x^2/2 + x/2 x/2 = log5(n) - x^2/2 x^2 + x - 2*log5(n) = 0 x = (-1 +- sqrt(1 + 8*log5(n)))/2 x = (-1 + sqrt(1 + 8*log5(n)))/2
eg: when n = 1000, (-1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*log(1000.)/log(5.)))/2. = 2.4722145528949215. 5.2.47 ~== 1000/5.((2.472 - 2.47)/2.) ~== 53
umm.. this is different from what i got before.. before i got x = 2 --> direct_constituency_size = 25, indirect_constituency_votes = 8. now i get x = 2 --> direct_constituency_size = 25, indirect_constituency_votes = 200. which is right? probably the new one (200)??
maxx = find(x > 2.47)[0] x = x direct_constituency_size = 5.x indirect_constituency_votes = n/5.((x2 - x)/2.) plot(direct_constituency_size, indirect_constituency_votes)
note: the integers still fall out of this naturally.. eg the top 5 delegates go on the Board; so since n=1000, the 6th delegate cant have more than 200 votes, b/c if e did e would have been in the top 5. The restriction for 200 votes is 25, so this means that the restriction for each of the top 5 delegates must be 25 or less. Note that if a Board member had 800 votes they would be restricted to about 7 direct constituents.
can a board member accept more votes than this, just to keep them away from others? eg if 800 individuals come to that guy, can he accept those 800 votes? i guess, but if he does that too much, someone else will get more votes than him and he'll be off the board. Also, if he accepts 400 votes or more, those votes could have put another ally on the board, giving his coalition more power.
note that with this system we have broken up the 'crystalline' structure of the hierarchical delegation, in that there may be different numbers of levels under different representatives. The benefit here is that we don't have discrete occasions where we change the integer number of levels as n goes up, forcing every political faction to reorganize (and bringing up the spectre of repeated reorganizations as n fluctuates around the transition point sometimes).
each rep has multiple distances, the multiple distinct distances from the individuals they represent (which might be different for different individuals; i guess you could calculate a weighted average distance though), and the single distance from the CEO. For the latter, i think this distance needs a name. You could use the term from Vattu ("emperor's proxy, double-proxy, etc"), but that's misleading because you are holding the proxy from the voters, not from the CEO. So what name to use? "rank" comes to mind, though it's not quite right. "Seniority"? but that already has a meaning. Primacy? Precedence? Standing? Preeminence? Power level? Station? Eminence? Clout? Office level? I'll keep thinking. So far i like "office level".
now, should reformulate those formulas to be more useful. In the above 'x' was the 'office rank' in a system with a 'crystalline' arrangement. Which is an abstract concept, so ppl shouldnt have to use that formula. What ppl will be interested in is: given that i have a coalition with X indirect votes that would support me, how many people may i have in my direct constituency?
so we need to eliminate x and make a formula that gives direct_constituency_size as a function of indirect_constituency_votes:
given n/5^((x^2 - x)/2), compute 5^x:
Let a = n/5^((x^2 - x)/2). Given a, compute x.
1/a = (5^((x^2 - x)/2))/n log5(1/a) = log5(5^((x^2 - x)/2)) - log5(n) log5(1/a) = ((x^2 - x)/2) - log5(n) 2*log5(1/a) = (x^2 - x) - 2*log5(n) 0 = (x^2 - x) - 2*(log5(n) + log5(1/a)) 0 = x^2 - x - 2*(log5(n/a))
x = (1 + sqrt(1 + 8*(log5(n/a))))/2 x = (1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*(log(n/a)/log(5.))))/2.
and direct_constituency_size = 5^x: direct_constituency_size = 5((1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*(log(electorate_size/votes)/log(5.))))/2.)
eg: electorate_size = 1000 votes=200
direct_constituency_size_limit = 5((1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*(log(electorate_size/votes)/log(5.))))/2.) 25
electorate_size = 1000; equals_point = 5((-1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*log(float(electorate_size))/log(5.)))/2.); constituency_votes_array = arange(ceil(equals_point),electorate_size); figure(); plot(constituency_votes_array, 5((1. + sqrt(1. + 8.*(log(float(electorate_size)/constituency_votes_array)/log(5.))))/2.)); xlabel('constituency_votes'); ylabel('constituency_member_limit');
(this suggests that we explore the simpler-looking formula:
5(sqrt(log(float(electorate_size)/constituency_votes_)/log(5.)))
eg when electorate_size = 1000, the largest constituencies would be 13, and you could have up to 7 members of 13-strength delegates, with 91 votes total; you could have up to 3 members of 91-strength delegates, with 273 votes total; the 273-vote delegates could go into groups of 2, with 546 each; so this formula doesn't permit the Board itself, although of course you could just let the formula peter out at 273, and then have the 5-member Board; but i don't like that the 273 groups only have 3 91-strength delegates, because 3 is less than 5) )
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secret ballots within constituencies. anyone can leave at any time, then the delegate loses their indirect vote. however, if you DONT affirmatively leave, then your vote continues to be delegated to your constituent's delegate.
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so, how to fight the possibility of a popular candidate just getting a bunch of subordinates to run constituencies that funnel to them, and then assigning voters into these contituencies?
first, that might work as long as the candidate is truly popular, but eventually voters within their faction will disagree with one thing or another, and join dissenting constituencies rather than the ones they were assigned.
second, if this (assigning voters to synthetic constituencies with delegates the voters dont actually know) does happen, we need to empower the delegates to actually become powers in their own right. We can start by providing them the right to address their constituents. Also, the voters would have to affirmatively leave the constituency, so even if the Big Boss has a falling out with this delegate, some voters wont bother to leave so this delegate still has some votes.
third, we need to give the delegates some powers of their own. Perhaps only delegates can be in Courts. Perhaps the lower-level delegates actually have a small vote on things before the Board. Etc. Todo: think about this.
fourth, as i noted before, NO OUTSIDE PARTY MAY HAVE ANY SAY IN NOMINATION OR VOTING WITHIN A CONSTITUENCY. A constituency can elect ANYONE to be their delegate; there cannot be laws like "you can't elect criminals". A constituency controls their own parliamentary procedure. do they control their own parlimentary procedure? because then the mafia could organize their own constituencies, and force them to have open ballots.
if constituencies have secret ballots, i guess there is no point allowing them to expel members or limit their membership.
if a constituency goes over the size threshold, that doesn't hurt it; the members are automatically rank-ordered by votes, and the maximal cutoff member is automatically selected (the n-th member, where n is the computed size limit), the sum of the votes up to that cutoff are counted, and the constituency delegate gets that many votes.
voting within a constituency is weighted by vote
(is this true even for the Board? maybe.. but a delegate cant opt to delegate if they qualify to be on the Board themselves, and the Board always has 5 ppl; so its not like a 1000 person group can have one board member with 800 votes, because then the limit would say they can only have 7 constituency members, and so each of those would have 800/7 = 114 votes themselves, so some of these would end up on the Board)
maybe if a constituency votes it, their votes are withheld from the strength of their delegate for a given vote (but not added to the other side; it's just an abstention, and the withheld votes, like abstentions, dont count against the 60% thresholds etc); this would give the sub-delegates some power (but makes things even more status-quo-y). Require a high vote for this, eg 66% (so, if 66% of your delegates votes to withhold, they withhold).
but your subdelegates can already vote to replace you with 66%, so how does this help empower them? Maybe the 66% is transitive, eg 66% counted over all of your votes?
No, how about just not having a 66% threshold; if even one person wants to withhold, they withhold their one vote from that one vote-count. But this would seem to make things more factional/extreme, b/c even if the representative wants to cross party lines, the extremists who voted for them will withhold their votes from that. Also, this withholding might support a Stalinist-style dynamic should one get started; because the withholding votes would have to be public, the Stalin could punish those party members who do NOT cast withholding votes when a party member tries to vote against the Stalin. Otoh, withholding sounds so innocent, so maybe it is okay.
---
no plea bargains
right to a speedy trial (or the govmt is charged; your verdict is the same as it was, but whatever it turns out to be, you get cash)
--
" makeitsuckless 17 hours ago
Internet voting has two essential, unpatchable vulnerabilities: voters cannot vote anonymously and are exposed to external pressure.
That's why we have voting booths: so people are guaranteed to be able to vote without someone looking over their shoulder (or pointing a gun at their heads).
If people cannot vote in total freedom and anonymity, it's not a truly free and democratic vote.
We should stop trying to "solve" everything with technology. Some things should be "hard", because it's essential to get it right.
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grrowl 16 hours ago
Postal voting has two essential, unpatchable vulnerabilities: anyone can open an envelope and can be exposed to external pressure.
People are exposed to enough pressure just by virtue of having to interact with politically passionate people just to get to the booths. In many cases, they don't check photo ID, just evidence of enrollment.
At very least, I'd like to see internet voting implemented without low-hanging security issues, enough confidence in their implementation to open-source the code, and with the backing of security researchers and organisations like the EFF. At least if we had issues like guns being pointed to heads and potential invalid double-votes, we could discuss them in the context they deserve.
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pjc50 14 hours ago
Yes, and this is a good reason why postal voting should not become too widespread. Stick to the ballot boxes.
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atirip 15 hours ago
In Estonia the pressure issue is solved. One can vote as many times needed. When first vote was given under pressure, one can vote differently later. As many times is needed. Internet voting is not possible on the voting day, only before. That assures that when one has no possibilty to vote without pressure in internet, one has possibility to vote traditionally. Traditional vote overturnes e-vote.
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https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine
tomjen3 15 hours ago
Whats to prevent the government from checking who voted what then later on then?
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mukyu 8 hours ago
There is nothing that prevents an online voting system from having a truly secret ballot. There is a class of algorithms[0] designed to compute a verifiable result from private inputs without revealing those inputs. One of the major applications of them being researched is voting.[1][2][3]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/075
[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.07469
[3] https://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/data/paper.php?pubkey=2203
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"
--
some 'numerology': why have a structure like the delegation pyramid where the branching factor increases geometrically at each level?
a common problem in complex systems is you have a very large number of 'leaf nodes' and you want to organize them into a tree, but you dont want to introduce too many levels in between the leaves and the root.
todo an idea might be wrong:
--
here are the rights given in the official constitution of China:
http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/content_1372964.htm
---
civilian commander-in-chief
separation of police from military
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_control_of_the_military#Composition_of_the_military
--
notes on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_democracy :
"the conditions necessary to ensure democracy were that an opposition to the union's leadership could form. This depended on ensuring the leadership did not monopolize the channels of communication with members"
" Frequent, contested elections, with rank-and-file members regularly challenging incumbents, and resultant turnover in officers and representatives, with all candidates having equal access to membership lists before elections, including the right to copy the list. Open publications, with newsletters and websites publishing all members' views, including those critical of officials, representatives, or union policy, and the union encouraging open and free debate and discussion of issues and candidates; with election candidates having equal use of union publications and means of communication (website, newsletter, e-mail list) to put out their campaign material. Member ratification, with all contracts and "side agreements" between union and management subject to ratification by secret ballot by the members covered by the contract. Strike votes: members should vote on striking, on return to work, and on other decisions during strikes, with strike votes not used to force members to ratify contracts ("either you vote 'yes' or you vote to strike"). "Informed vote": the complete text of proposed contract changes, amendments, referendums, etc. should be distributed to members prior to ratification votes, with sufficient time for meaningful membership review and discussion, and the union circulating (or at least not obstructing) different opinions about the contract offer. Election of representatives: shop stewards, business agents and other member representatives (paid or otherwise) should be elected by secret ballot of the members they represent, and subject to recall by the members they represent; stewards and active members should be trained in legal rights and organizing; and there should be stewards' councils that meet to plan and coordinate action. Grievants' rights: workers should participate fully in the grievance process at every step, with full information about their case and its progress. Member access to information: union representatives should provide members current and complete copies of the contract and the union constitution/bylaws, and the contract and constitution should be published on union websites. Members must have easy access to information on officers' salaries, budget, and expenses. Union representatives should regularly inform members of their rights under national and local law, and how to enforce them, including rights and responsibilities under the relevant regulations. Regular local meetings, to be at least quarterly, announced ahead of time, at a time and place convenient to members, with an agenda circulated in advance, under reasonable quorum requirements not set so high as to prevent valid membership meetings. Real business should be conducted (not just a pep rally), with members encouraged to speak, make proposals, vote, and ask questions, and meeting minutes available to all members afterwards. Independent organizing and communication outside union official structure: members should have the right to organize in independent committees and caucuses, publish rank-and-file newsletters and websites, and run candidates for union office, and union officers should encourage this. Inclusion and equality: all members should be treated fairly, with the union fighting discrimination by management and among members. Union officers and representatives should reflect membership in terms of gender, race, language, craft or bargaining unit, seniority, etc. Union contracts, constitution and bylaws, meetings, and publications should be accessible in the languages spoken by members. Education for members: unions should train all interested members in legal rights and organizing, including how to participate effectively in the union and how to organize on the job.
While there are some superficial similarities to the so-called organizing model of union activity, advocates of union democracy are swift to point out that many of the alleged exemplars of the organizing model do not, in their internal structure, meet the requirements listed above. "
---
is a multiparty system
no party may have a 'ban on factions', even temporarily
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no inheritance of power
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civilian control of the military; and, military does not influence politics
civilian control of the intelligence services; and, intelligence services do not influence politics
military not used internally or for internal policing
intelligence services not used for internal policing
--
no cruel or unusual punishments
--
no secret courts
--
right not to self-incriminate. no incentive or encouragement to confess.
if a person does self-incriminate, the organization may not use this against them
--
no plea bargains
--
(how to disallow eg 'struggle sessions'?)
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notes on the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_skepticism_of_democracy :
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election
--
judicial independence
--
press freedoms
--
importance of "ecret ballot, direct election, multiple candidates" -- http://olemiss.edu/courses/pol324/zhao03.pdf
--
freedoms of: expression, residence, religion, association freedoms of: speech, press, assembly, association
personal political rights independence of the legal system equal treatment by the government popular (and/or individual?) influence on government policy
--
freedom equality soliciting and listening to ppl's opinions when making decisions government for the ppl joint decision-making elections and participation in the decision-making process rights checks and balances multi-party competition rule of law
--
civil service as the only initiator of proposals (pan wei's 'consultatative rule of law', constitution of year VII) vs elected legislature
--
note that 'rule of law' is at least in theory a separate criterion from elections (Pan Wei, as described in Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law Vs. Democratization By Suisheng Zhao)
(i think Pan Wei used to be at Beijing University, but maybe now he's here? unless this is someone else?: http://www.thinkinchina.asia/pan-wei/ )
--
--
idea that i'm no longer in favor of (too much complexity for too little gain):
fork by simple majority, but only if investor equity is preserved, seed group members are partitioned or seed group is duplicated and then each goees thru a prespecific set of reallocations all of which HAVE been agreed to by 2/3 of the existing seed group, assets distributed along seed group lines, all assets with nonexclusive ???? or mb simp maj of both partitions, OR 2/s overall?
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antimonopoly
antimonosony
no copyrights, patents
--
binding, no cost legal advice from the organization (eg you should be able to ask 'is this against the rules?' or 'how should i do that?' and they should be able to give you an answer such that if you follow their advice you are guaranteed not to get in trouble)
--
three traditional kinds of interpretation in English law:
in other words, plain meaning vs reject absurd results vs intent?
--
the word 'egregore' might be useful somewhere as a name, unless it is too 'mystical'
--
'parliamentary procedure' of China's NPC (national people's congress):
provided all original financial data is provided in a simple, standardized electronic form chosen by the organization (such form not requiring any choices regarding the legal status of various things), the organization must provide accounting/lawyer services to all members to compute dues or taxes, and is liable to each member if the provided service computes more dues/taxes than could legally have been computed by different choices
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tax on advertising
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rule of thumb of recent political economy: when the economy dos poorly, there is a political demand for losses to be socialized because this will at least in the midterm, assist the "common man" who is suffering. however, the process of socializing losses benefits the connected, and so the rich benefit massively, increasing income inequality. (suggestion: a constitutional mandate not to socialize losses; instead, when times are tough, direct payments to average individuals should be the only allowed option)
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"When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. - See more at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule"
---
evan miller's thing on using the lower bound of confidence intervals in reputation systems:
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
he's using "Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter". He's using Bernoulli, eg ignoring magnitude of rating and only looking at positive or negative (so each voter has 3 choices, +1, 0/no opinion, -1).
this doesnt quite work for us b/c to prevent negative campaigning we want the 'default vote' to be the lowest possible one.
but i wonder how it would work out if we ran this formula on votes where the default vote was -1? Eg voters are presented with 0, +1, +2, but the formula sees it as +1/-1/no opinion. So voting +1 changes your 'actual impact' from -1 to no opinion.
python code (fixing z at 1, for 68% confidence; use 1.3 for 80% confidence, 1.5 for 87% confidence, 1.65 for 90% confidence, 1.96 for 95% confidence, etc; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation#Rules_for_normally_distributed_data for tables of values ):
from math import sqrt def ci_lower_bound(pos, n): if n == 0: return 0 #z = Statistics2.pnormaldist(1-(1-confidence)/2) z = 1 phat = 1.0*pos/n return (phat + z*z/(2*n) - z * sqrt((phat*(1-phat)+z*z/(4*n))/n))/(1+z*z/n)
seems that, compared to single-seat score voting, it overweights the importances of ppl voting +1; consider a candidate towards which 30% of the voters feel positive; compare if 30% give +1, to the case where 15% give +1 and 15% give +2, to the case where 30% give +2:
score voting: 30, 45, 60
lower bound of ci eg ci_lower_bound(0,70) ci_lower_bound(15,70) ci_lower_bound(30,70): 0, 0.165, 0.37
45/60. = 0.75 0.165/0.37 = 0.445945945945946
some ideas from http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm :
Companies should only be allowed to store behavioral data for 90 days.
Behavioral data is any information about yourself you don't explicitly share, but that services can observe about you. This includes your IP address, cell tower, inferred location, recent search queries, the contents of your shopping cart, your pulse rate, facial expression, what pages or ads you clicked, browser version, and on and on. At present, all of this data can be stored indefinitely and sold or given away.
You should have the right to completely remove their account and all associated personal information from any online service
You should have the right to download data that you have provided, or that has been collected by observing your behavior, in a usable electronic format. (but mb not immediately; impose a max time for backups)
Ban on Third-Party Ad Tracking
Any device with embedded Internet access should be required to have a physical switch that disconnects the antenna, and be able to function normally with that switch turned off.
You should have the right to download data that you have provided, or that has been collected by observing your behavior, in a usable electronic format.
and from https://puri.sm/posts/hard-not-soft-kill-switches/ :
all devices shall clearly indicate if they are equipped with microphones or videocameras or similar sensory equipment, and if so, shall possess hardware 'kill switches' that turn off that sensory equipment, and turn off power to that sensory equipment
" Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority. "
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some notes on a prison guard arbitration system that may not be working so well:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/09/27/why-it-s-so-hard-to-fire-an-abusive-prison-guard
" Arbitrators are not chosen at random. Rather, both sides review a list of candidates and rate them based on how favorably inclined they believe they will be toward their arguments. Arbitrators, who earn $1,000 to $1,800 a day, often try to find a middle ground to avoid antagonizing either side, some officials complain.
“We have a culture of arbitrators who engage in ‘split the baby,’ no matter the offense,” said a state corrections official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.
For the Bukowski case, the parties settled on a veteran arbitrator, Larry Dais, a former assistant vice president of Columbia University who had been hearing labor disputes since 1999. Over three days last fall, Dais heard testimony and evidence. The union maintained that Bukowski was innocent and described him as “a dedicated correctional officer.” Dais ruled in November that Bukowski was guilty of using excessive force and lying to investigators. But noting in his five-page decision that this was the officer’s first such infraction, Dais reduced the penalty from termination to a 120-day, unpaid suspension.
... ((in another case)) Evidence was introduced that showed bruises on the inmate. But after hearing conflicting versions of the episode from other guards, the arbitrator decided against dismissal and sent Wehby back to work. "
this is just anecdotal -- is this a statistically valid pattern? if so, what could be done to improve this? maybe assign the arb at random? another problem here is that this arb system appears to be focused on viewing these situations as whether or not the prison guard's crimes deserve a certain punishment -- where the bigger issue is protecting the safety of the prisoners, which may at times mean firing a prison guard based on suspicion, without proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt. Is there a way to inject that sort of reasoning into an arbitration system? Or is an arb system structurally destined to 'split the baby' between the two parties and their interests -- guaranteeing that prisoner safety will be considered as an interests of the prison, which will be weighted equally with the interests of the guard?
this last bit suggests that perhaps introducing a third 'stakeholder' party to the choice of arbitrator might help, esp if the choice was voted rather than chosen by consensus of the parties. Eg a prisoner's rights group.
what is the name of the following type of situation? i hypothesize that if the per capita count per unit time of this situation is high, then the country has an unhealthy political system:
Person A, who is thought to be doing X, is approached by Person B. Person B is either Person A's hierarchical superior in some way, or is known to be more politically connected than Person A. Person B says to Person A, "Hi, I personally totally support your right to do X, but I have been asked by (a superior/someone in the know/someone better connected than i) to pass along a message to you. The message is: "The government wants you to stop doing X". I do not know where this message originated but the person who told it to me had a high degree of confidence that it is genuine and i have a high degree of confidence in that person, although that person has asked me not to reveal their identity to you. Therefore i consider this message to have a high probability of being genuine.". The implication is that the government is threatening to use force to punish Person A if person does not stop doing X. Person A considers it probable that the message is real and that this a credible threat, because Person A has heard of other people in this situation who ignored the message and who were then punished, whether officially by prosecution for doing X, or officially by prosecution and 'throwing the boot at' (getting a maximal sentence for a crime for which usually the sentence is much smaller) for some other non-X thing that Person A is doing, or unofficially by unfair use of regulatory power by government agencies, or unofficially by intimidating Person A's professional connections to stop supporting Person A, or unofficially by punishing Person A's family or friends.
What are the problems with this scenario that cause me to consider it 'unhealthy'?:
Is there a concise way to explain what desirable proposition is violated by this situation? Perhaps:
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https://lessig2016.us/the-plan/
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this guy apparently spends a bunch of time thinking about governance systems, and he's spent a lot of time talking to experts, and he's written down his ideas:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-09-27/deep-thoughts-with-the-homeless-billionaire
Nicolas Berggruen Institute
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-074565973X.html Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berggruen_Institute
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no software may be used to produce forensic evidence against an entity (except for the Organization) in a criminal trial unless its source code is viewable and auditable by the public
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note that 'victimless crime' must be defined to include activities which are presently illegal and which, due to their illegality, require engaging with black-market operators who also commit other, victim-ful crimes, but which if made legal would not require this
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i feel like some sort of voting procedure based on one of these might be useful in some situation, perhaps relating to agenda control, budgeting, or (legal) vote purchasing, but i'm not sure what yet. Just writing it down for future reference:
https://wiki.ripple.com/Contracts#Penny_Auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_bid_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_attrition_%28game%29
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grendelt 22 hours ago
Hello from the "Eastern District of Texas" (I live 27 miles from the US Courthouse in Marshall). The lack of educated citizens with critical thinking skills is overwhelming. This is why juries hand down absurd findings in patent troll cases. "All this technical mumbo jumbo just makes my head spin".
I've sat on mock juries for corporate law firms before (IP/patent law is interesting and easy money to sit for mock jury) and more than once I've skewed their findings because of my technical/electronics background. During the breaks the folks that are participating are total block heads that don't understand even the most elementary explanations given.
I now often wonder if patent cases should be trial by jury or trial by subject matter expert panels. The lack of technical literacy shows that the populace is woefully unprepared to serve as jurors in these cases.
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WildUtah? 22 hours ago
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the specialized patent appeals court. It was created in 1982. Before that the regular appeals courts heard patent appeals. The idea was that subject matter experts and scientist-judges would be better able to adjudicate complicated patent appeals.
What we got from the CAFC was the explosion of software patents, regular messes of abusive patent rules, an overwhelming bias against small companies accused of infringement by monster corps with patent portfolios, legalization of patents based on abstract ideas, and regular rebukes by the Supreme Court that has to try to rein them in with regular 9-0 decisions that the CAFC then finds ways to ignore.
The problem is that anyone who could get appointed to such a court is probably personally invested in the power of the patent system. His history is probably in mega corps with thousands of patents to block innovative disruptors. Such a judge's future prestige and professional respect is determined by how much he supports omnipotent and unlimited patents with little review of validity.
So these judges are inevitably judging their own careers in every case. They are as biased and corrupt as you might expect anyone to be when asked to judge the limits of his own power and influence.
No. Cases should not be tried by juries of subject matter experts. That just leads to more corruption. We do need better rules that make it harder to abuse the system, but we're better off with ordinary judges and juries making the decisions, even though they sometimes screw it up through ignorance. At least they aren't screwing it up by malice like certain federal judges.
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nitrogen 19 hours ago
What about having juries composed of actual peers? That is, randomly selected experts, half from industry and half from academia? The lack of prolonged engagement and predictable assignment to cases should make it harder to end up with another CAFC.
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JupiterMoon? 16 hours ago
The point is that this leads to corruption. A jury-of-peers reflects and represents wider society. A jury-of-some-selected-close-peers as you are suggesting would not reflect the needs of wider society.
Other other hand the broadly selected jury won't be able to understand technical cases.
Its 6 one half-a-dozen the other. (UK English expression that means both ways have major flaws and neither is ideal.)
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MichaelGG? 17 hours ago
This is the problem with juries in general. No one understands basic probability or how to treat evidence. It might be more apparent in technical cases, but it's just as much a miscarriage of justice in most other cases, too.
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CyberDildonics? 21 hours ago
It should be a jury one's peers, but for some reason we've decided that the average uninformed person is a peer to everyone.
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AndrewKemendo? 14 hours ago
the folks that are participating are total block heads that don't understand even the most elementary explanations given.
You could expand that to describe the entirety of the modern electorate and you would have your answer for most of the ills of society.
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juries for eg technical cases (how to generalize this?): 1/3 outside experts (eg academics), 1/3 industry peers, 1/3 randomly selected ppl
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" Since there was a decision of the government that affected their interests, it was possible under Mexican law to demand a "Jucio de Amparo" which can be roughly translated as a "Sanctuary Trial" and it similar to suing the government but not quite. IANAL, but the bottom line as far as I know is that you can demand the court to evaluate and interject decisions from other branches of government if you think your rights are being violated. The SMART activist group did win that trial. "
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http://blog.dilbert.com/post/133002440146/voluntary-restricted-democracy has the idea that policy regarding illegal immigration should be determined by legal immigrants, and the policy regarding abortion should be determined by females
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" Robin Hanson brought up the topic of prediction markets as a form of “low-cost micro-governance”: if there are situations where a legal or arbitration process is required in order to ultimately resolve disputes, use a prediction market to provide the result instead, only occasionally escalating to the underlying arbitration mechanism. Anyone with private information has the incentive to participate in the prediction market: the parties to the dispute themselves, any third parties involved, and even firms like Google applying top-of-the-line machine learning algorithms; in most cases, a result that accurately predicts the result that would be obtained by the underlying court or arbitration system should be attainable very cheaply. "
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"I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true.
...
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
...
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
...
The Hands On Imperative is on life support. “The Freedom to Tinker” might sound like a hobby, but it’s quite important. It means our ability to study, modify and ultimately understand the technology we use — and that structures and defines our lives. ...
The law: Two examples. It was exactly ten years ago that Black Hat staff spent all night cutting pages out of attendee books and re-stuffing conference sacks with new CDs. Security researcher Mike Lynn was scheduled to give a talk about a previously unknown category of vulnerability, specifically flaws in Internet routers. Cisco, and Mike Lynn’s employer ISS, decided at the last minute to try to keep the vulnerability a secret, ordering Mike to give a different talk and leveraging copyright law to force Black Hat to destroy all copies of Mike’s slides. There’s nothing that cries out censorship like cutting pages out of books.
...
Here's a quiz. What do emails, buddy lists, drive back ups, social networking posts, web browsing history, your medical data, your bank records, your face print, your voice print, your driving patterns and your DNA have in common? Answer: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn't think any of these things are private. Because the data is technically accessible to service providers or visible in public, it should be freely accessible to investigators and spies. And yet, to paraphrase Justice Sonya Sotomayor, this data can reveal your contacts with 'the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, or the gay bar'. ... But I want to emphasize how important the ruling is, because I think many people might not fully understand what the reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant requirement mean. It means that a judge polices access, so that there has to be a good reason for the search or seizure, it can’t be arbitrary. It also means that the search has to be targeted, because a warrant has to specifically describe what is going to be searched. The warrant requirement is not only a limitation on arbitrary police action, it should also limit mass surveillance. ... The DOJ pushes:
· Provider assistance provisions to require providers to assist with spying;
· Corporate immunity for sharing data with the government, for example giving AT&T immunity in its complicity with NSA’s illegal domestic spying and in CISPA, CISA and other surveillance proposals masquerading as security information sharing bills;
· And, not so much yet in the U.S. but in other countries, data retention obligations that essentially deputize companies to spy on their users for the government.
Globalization gives the U.S. a way to spy on Americans…by spying on foreigners we talk to. Our government uses the fact that the network is global against us. The NSA conducts massive spying overseas, and Americans’ data gets caught in the net. And, by insisting that foreigners have no Fourth Amendment privacy rights, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that you don’t have such rights either, as least when you’re talking to or even about foreigners. ... To have any hope of attaining the Dream of Internet Freedom, we have to implement legal reforms to stop suspicion-less spying. We have to protect email and our physical location from warrantless searches. We have to stop overriding the few privacy laws we have to gain with a false sense of online security. We have to utterly reject secret surveillance laws, if only because secret law is an abomination in a democracy. ... Here’s just one public example: our government wants weakened cryptography, back doors in popular services and devices so that it can surveil us (remember, without a warrant). It is unmoved by the knowledge that these back doors will be used by criminals and oppressive governments alike. Meanwhile, it overclassifies, maintains secret law, withholds documents from open government requests, goes after whistleblowers and spies on journalists.
Here’s another. The White House is pushing for the Department of Homeland Security to be the hub for security threat information sharing. That means DHS will decide who gets vulnerability information… and who doesn’t.
I see governments and elites picking and choosing security haves and security have nots. In other words, security will be about those in power trying to get more power. ... In the U.S., copyright was the first cause for censorship, but now we are branching out to political speech.
Governments see the power of platforms and have proposed that social media companies alert federal authorities when they become aware of terrorist-related content on their sites. A U.N. panel last month called on the firms to respond to accusations that their sites are being exploited by the Islamic State and other groups. At least at this point, there’s no affirmative obligation to police in the U.S.
But you don’t have to have censorship laws if you can bring pressure to bear. People cheer when Google voluntarily delists so-called revenge porn, when YouTube? deletes ISIS propaganda videos, when Twitter adopts tougher policies on hate speech. The end result is collateral censorship, by putting pressure on platforms and intermediaries, governments can indirectly control what we say and what we experience. ... Make no mistake, this censorship is inherently discriminatory. Muslim “extremist” speech is cause for alarm and deletion. But no one is talking about stopping Google from returning search results for the Confederate flag. ... Globalization means other governments are in the censorship mix. I’m not just talking about governments like Russia and China. There’s also the European Union, with its laws against hate speech, Holocaust denial, and its developing Right To Be Forgotten. Each country wants to enforce its own laws and protect and police its citizens as it sees fit, and that means a different internet experience for different countries or regions. In Europe, accurate information is being delisted from search engines, to make it harder or impossible to find. So much for talking to everyone everywhere in real time. So much for having everything on the Internet shelf.
Worse, governments are starting to enforce their laws outside their borders through blocking orders to major players like Google and to ISPs. France is saying to Google, don’t return search results that violate our laws to anyone, even if it’s protected speech that we are entitled to in the U.S. If you follow this through to the obvious conclusion, every country will censor everywhere. It will be intellectual baby food. ... Let me describe another future where the Internet Dream lives and thrives.
We start to think globally. We need to deter another terrorist attack in New York, but we can’t ignore impact our decisions have on journalists and human rights workers around the world. We strongly value both.
We build in decentralization where possible: Power to the People. And strong end to end encryption can start to right the imbalance between tech, law and human rights.
We realize the government has no role in dictating communications technology design.
We start being afraid of the right things and stop being driven by irrational fear. We reform the CFAA, the DMCA, the Patriot Act and foreign surveillance law. We stop being so sensitive about speech and we let noxious bullshit air out. If a thousand flowers bloom, the vast majority of them will be beautiful. "
-- Jennifer Granick ---
cmdkeen 7 hours ago
The US justice systems != all jury systems. I've experienced the justice system in both England and Scotland (they're different!), from the Scottish perspective as a police officer and the English one as a member of a jury on two cases.
In both instances the lawyers who practice, especially in more serious cases, need "a right of audience" - that is they are either an English barrister/Scottish advocate or a solicitor who has undergone additional training. For a case like a murder trial both sides will have solicitors who appoint experienced counsel to actually make the argument in court. This is the key that the American system doesn't have - those counsel almost always act for both defence and prosecution - they are not professional prosecutors or defenders. Some specialise in one direction or the other, but they avoid the tribalism and chasing of conviction rates. There is the equivalent of the DA, that is the senior state lawyers who rarely actually appear in court, but they come up through the tradition of the independent bar.
What that leads to is a prosecution and defence that both tend towards the interest of justice. Given that you end up with the professionals all striving to test the burden of proof, not grandstanding - which leads to a more harmonious jury experience. Many of my friends from university became lawyers, some of the brightest minds in the country practice at the criminal bar and conduct "legal aid" defences - i.e. act as public defenders. It is the equivalent of the defence attorney in the article's case being a Harvard Law graduate.
No legal system is perfect, many are starved of funds, every one has had prominent scandals over the years. I would submit that the jury system is still a valuable check and balance and works remarkable well when combined with an independent, professional, bar which avoids perverse incentives.
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i prefer score voting over spending tokens because of clone-independence, but if nominations weren't free then perhaps clone independence isn't so much of a problem. Is there a way to make ppl pay some token to demonstrate how much they care about each issue? This would then be more flexible than things like "60%" and "66%" for supermajorities.
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some design heuristics:
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" CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design) http://hci.st/seminar http://cs547.stanford.edu/speaker.php?date=2016-01-08
Transparency measures for empirical social science research (e.g., replication data and pre-analysis plans) make mistakes and misconduct easier to discover, but do not announce them on their own; this requires third-party researchers to investigate and articulate concerns about mistakes or misconduct in others' research. Currently, there are significant disincentives for researchers to do so. This is especially the case when concerns about others' research have a `personal' valence, such as concerns that another researcher has misrepresented results, analyzed data incorrectly, deviated from a pre-analysis plan, p-hacked, or fabricated data. Articulating concerns like these often involves great effort and can introduce negative personal consequences for critics and potentially innocent researchers. These costs dissuade many potential critics from articulating concerns about published research. That potential critics can be expected to remain silent reduces the disincentives for dishonest conduct and the accuracy of the scientific record. It also does not give innocent authors the opportunity to respond to concerns about their research.
This note proposes a web platform for disclosing concerns about published research and allowing authors to respond. The key features of the proposed system are revokable anonymity, revokable confidentiality, and an information escrow for communications between author and critic (Ayers and Unkovic 2012). Critic anonymity allows for critics to express their concerns without fear of reprisal. Confidentiality allows innocent accused authors to answer concerns without having their reputation unjustly tarnished before they have prepared a response. Both protections are revokable together by the critic at any time, while only confidentiality and not critic anonymity is revokable by the author at any time. The existence of a potentially public verified record of the confidential exchange is expected to facilitate appropriate behavior during the confidential period. Minimal additional structure is proposed, deferring to the judgment of critics and authors about what steps will be viewed as appropriate within their fields and what information must be provided during a communication on the platform. The role of the technology is providing 1) a third-party information escrow and 2) communication platform, 3) with the public disclosure features previously described.
David Broockman is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford GSB. David received his PhD? in political science at UC Berkeley in 2015. His research focuses on public opinion and how politicians represent it, and has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and other journals. "
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no 'rules of evidence' may prohibit the introduction of evidence by the defence into a jury trial
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no part of, affiliate of, agent of, contractor of, or supporter of the government may realize any gain or benefit from asset forfeiture, prison labor, or any other consequence of law enforcement activities
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perhaps a constitutional limit on the percent of the population which may be imprisoned at one time
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reasonable suspicion (eg towards detainment, surveillance, warrents, etc) can never be based on political activities or beliefs, or on the content or audience of information produced or disseminated, or on the activities of learning, reading, writing, speaking, communication, investigation, legal advice-giving, journalism, IT support, or publication, or on the identity of other entities who have been assisted in these activities
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no such thing as civil forfeiture; all seizure of property may only be done after successfully prosecuting the owner
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no government agency or agent is permitted to contractually agree to any secrecy or non-disclosure provisions regarding or tangential to their official work
the full text of all contracts to which any government agency is a party must be publically disclosed
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can we get rid of patents in general but still find a way to fund drug trials with something similar? first, why would we want to do this? The intuition is that patents are bad in general because (a) due to the continued ramification of technical specialization, it is infeasible for the government to employ enough patent examiners to cover all specialties; therefore any real-world implementation of the patent system will always have an unacceptably high number of bad patents because insufficently specialized examiners will allow patenting of things which are obvious to the (handful of) actual specialists in the given area; and (b) because the relationships between possible concepts are fluid, making it hard to crisply identity when some conceptual patent is being infringed, (c) even if it were possible to avoid bad patents, with such a large number of people in the world many ideas will be independently re-discovered before the patent expires, and the loss of the use of these rediscoveries outweighs the benefit to the public from disclosure, (d) even if it were possible to not have bad patents and to crisply determine which ideas infringe which patents, in conceptual areas the lost benefits of less cross-pollination of ideas greatly outweighs the additional research funding attracted by the possibility of patenting, and (e) regulation of ideas infringes upon fundamental human rights.
Is the patenting of pharmaceutical compounds an exception to this? Maybe:
(a) i don't know (b) the chemical identity of a compound is crisp, unlike ideas (c) the cost borne by the pharma companies is not discovery, but funding of clinical trials. This will not be re-done many times over. (d) i don't know (e) see below, i don't propose to regulate ideas, only marketing
in short, my feeling is that patents don't work, except that they seem to work in the specific case of funding clinical trials for new drugs. Aside from drug clinical trials, i can't think of any other area of technology where patent monopolies appear to be the economic reason for a research activity to be funded where it otherwise wouldn't be. Eg look at mobile phones, subject to big patent lawsuits; there are plenty of eg iPhone clones in China, yet the genuine iPhones sold by Apple are still making enough money that Apple would not have been better off if they had not invented the iPhone. There are a few reasons for this: (a) Apple's suppliers have an incentive not to copy them and damage their relationship, (b) Apple's product is perceived as more reliable because Apple stands behind it, (c) owning the genuine article is a status symbol -- these are not enough to prevent a large market for clones but they are enough to make it profitable for companies like Apple to develop phones.
my proposal is:
(a) abolish patents
(b) the FDA claims to have the authority to regulate drug marketing. Instead of giving a temporary patent monopoly to whoever claims to have discovered a drug, give a temporary marketing monopoly to the pharmaceutical company which executes the first successful application to demonstrate via clinical trials the safety and efficacy of the drug. (now, i'm not sure that the FDA's regulation of marketing is not itself a human rights violation, but regulation of marketing is certainly LESS of a human rights violation than regulation of ideas in general and their application; personally i would be okay with both abolishing patents and NOT giving any other monopoly to companies and scaling back clinical trial requirements, but if ppl really dont want to scale back the clinical trial requirements then this is a way to fund them)
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right to leave
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victimless crimes:
if the activity is dangerous to others (eg architecture, flying), yet not so dangerous that it is flat-out forbidden (nuclear weapons) then the training may take 120 hours, participants may be charged a reasonable rate, up to 80% of applicants may be rejected and denied the chance to be trained, and up to 80% of (accepted, trained) candidates may fail the test on their first try. There is still the option for applicants to skip right to the test at the end. However, if the applicants pass the test yet did not undergo the training, they may be requried to train afterwards (passing the test first try guarantees that they are accepted to training, even if they were rejected earlier), however since they passed the test, this training must be free.
Other licensing is prohibited. Insofar as people must be protected from other people harming them (here, by 'harm' is not meant just violence, but also annoying, inconveniencing, etc, eg noise regulation is 'preventing harm'), the organization can make regulations about what may not be done (eg building codes) but may not, other than as above, insist that only some prescreened people are allowed to do it.
Sometimes governments have made regulations, not to protect people from other people harming them, but to increase economic efficiency/orderliness. Without a motive to prevent harm, the organization may not impose upon the freedom of action of members, except to require disclosure. The organization may, however, certify some organizations and/or products and/or services and/or service providers as recommended or as meeting some standard. The government cannot penalize those who do not get these voluntary certifications, and it cannot compel anyone to apply for certification, or say whether or not someone in particular who didn't apply would have achieved it (unless this would merely be the application of a formula to information about the entity that is public knowledge), but it can require entities to disclose to others that they interact with whether or not they got the certification.
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no 'gag orders'
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widely publicly known information can't be considered a secret (eg no prohibitions on talking about it further)
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a random comment thread on corruption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162796
one comment references this book:
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=512
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the organization does not have any powers over its members aside from those that are explicitly enumerated here
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restriction of movement of military forces to within 200 miles of our border
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two referenda needed to go to war: a) the whole population b) only those of age who are subject to, and most likely to be, conscripted and sent into the most dangerous theatres
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maybe in addition to 'victimless crime' regulations for providing information, there can also be privacy regs
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this is an overly long list of purported police scanner codes, perhaps it would be useful for an alternate ontology of crime that could help in making a short legal code:
http://www.tech-faq.com/police-scanner-codes.html
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some links related to suggested lobbying regulations (i've already skimmed and integrated these):
another anticorruption item, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11258208 says that this open procurement system helped a lot in Ukraine:
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studentrob 2 days ago
Taiwan is mostly cash and they use a receipt lottery to encourage people to buy from vendors who give receipts. Each receipt has a number and there's a lottery at the end of the month with cash prizes.
Also, people here know they can report a business for not giving out receipts. They might get a share of recovered taxes for that.
I don't know all the pros and cons of that setup but it seems there are ways to maintain a cash based system and still collect taxes.
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tomchentw 2 days ago
Taiwanese confirmed here. Basically we use a lot of cash in our daily lives. The "hidden economy" still exists in some places, like some outdoor vendors or night markets.
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hawkice 1 day ago
I was familiar with the lotteries (didn't participate -- I just put my receipts in the charity buckets or the trash) but had NO IDEA this was why. I just assumed it was because the culture is just much more amenable to gambling (which I think is also true, but might not be the reason it's tied to receipts).
If this is truly the reason for the lotteries, is the government / tax agency giving out the prizes? I never bothered to look closely but it always seemed something run by those businesses.
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kyrra 2 days ago
China has something similar as well, called the Fapiao: http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2013/08/13/understanding-...
Though as I understand it, it requires a dot matrix printer to populate these receipts (or writing them by hand).
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studentrob 2 days ago
Hmm I don't remember receiving many receipts in China. I spent 3 months there over two occasions a couple years ago. Taiwan's implementation appears more successful to me. Fapiao means receipt, so that makes sense. There is some required hardware or software but doesn't seem any more cumbersome than a credit card machine and printer. Nearly every shop has them in TW.
Edit: reading further I see China is rolling out their lottery in more areas the last few years
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SimpleMinds? 2 days ago
That's because you have to actively ask for it. If you don't, they never (almost) give it to you, as business buy those fapiaos from gov.
We asked for them quite often and they gave them each time. Total, we won 2 cans of Coke and maybe 10 yuan :)
Fun fact - fapiaos you get might be fake. Once I got fake fapiao, printed from fake printer, in fake taxi. I know it's fake because I tried to validate it online (there's service for that) after I noticed I got fake bill :/
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perhaps have state monopoly over the sale (but not personal production and donation, if not linked to commercial activity) of all addictive substances
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1 argues for this, but i can make a simpler argument in my framework:
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Portugal's successful drug decriminalization:
" When applying the lessons of Portugal to the United States, it’s important to note that the Portuguese didn’t just throw open access to dangerous drugs without planning for people who couldn’t handle them. Portugal poured money into drug treatment, expanding the number of addicts served by more than 50 percent. It established Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, each of which is composed of three people — often a doctor, a social worker, and an attorney — who are authorized to refer a drug user to treatment and in some cases impose a relatively small fine. " -- https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1
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here's a theory on corruption:
there is a sharp 'phase change' w/r/t corruption in society. Basically, the phase change is when it becomes possible to sufficiently avoid corruption in most people's lives (including in the lives of most businesspeople etc) so that it becomes feasible for the typical person to take the position of "i am squeaky clean" (which is shorthand for: "i not a lawbreaker. I don't ever engage in corruption, even minor corruption. In following laws, even senseless bureaucratic ones, i dot my is and cross my ts"). A person who is 'squeaky clean', for example, would never give a bribe to cops or to bureaucrats.
You can see where i'm going with this. In societies in which you cannot feasibly get through everyday life without engaging in corruption, the 'typical person' does not know anyone who is squeaky clean (or probably more likely, there are people who are 'squeaky clean' in the context of their society, but in this context not engaging in corruption is not thought of as part of squeaky clean). Life would be very difficult for someone who wanted to not assist corruption on principal, and such an action would not be considered an ethical imperative by their peers (maybe it would be considered such in word, but not in deed, eg no one is being shunned for not doing this). Because it is impractical to get anything done without bribes, they are not reluctant to offer a bribe or to give one if requested, and this creates a positive feedback loop that keeps bribing a common thing. If they were to become an elite, their peers would not consider it very wrong if they were to engage in corruption themself, because this is seen as simply the reality of the world.
But there's another side to this theory, relating to avoidance of organized crime. Sometimes you hear stories of people who claim they unintentionally got 'mixed up' in organized crime, eg [1] [2]. One story goes, that these people were employed by or doing business with people whom they thought were not criminals, and then at some point theey realized that the other people were criminals and tried to stop working with them, but the criminals coerced the (presumed) innocents into continuing to work with them, usually by threatening violence against them and/or their families. Now in any particular case you have to wonder if perhaps the supposed innocents actually knew what they were getting into and are just saying this now to avoid legal punishment. But even if so, it doesn't seem unlikely that this sort of situation actually does happen sometimes to some people somewhere, even if it's hard to know reliably whether it happened to any specific person. This is a terrible situation to be in; in the story, usually the people acquiesce to the criminals and do their bidding, and then of course, having seen that these people can be cowed by the threat of violence, the criminals continue to force the people to stay involved over many criminal projects (based on this, it seems like perhaps the best thing to do if you find yourself in this situation would be to refuse to comply after being threatened, but this is a bad situation to be in regardless). In the stories we hear about, eventually the criminals get caught and now the supposed innocents are in trouble with the law, but of course one imagines that in some of these situations the criminals are not caught.
So if this is a terrible situation to get into, then a person who does not wish to participate in crime should consider taking action to make it less likely. And this means trying to avoid working with criminals, even criminals who haven't told you that they are criminals. Since you have to support yourself, you can't avoid working with everyone, so you have to try to guess who is a criminal and who isn't. And here we get a shred of hope, because in some of these stories, even before it became clear that the criminals were criminals, they revealed themselves as decidedly not-squeaky-clean; 'sketchy' or 'shady' people, involved in potentially improper stuff. So a person might try to minimize doing business with others who are not perceived as squeaky clean. Which provides an incentive for people to be seen as squeaky clean.
Now this provides a positive feedback loop in the direction of eliminating corruption. In a society in which the typical person can feasibly be squeaky clean, and in which the sense of squeaky clean includes not being corrupt, even if they don't get caught, there is a cost to any individual of being corrupt because they will encounter other people who will dissociate from them.
And as this takes hold, it might be seen as not-squeaky-clean to even associate with people who are not-squeaky-clean, which strengthens the positive feedback loop.
So we have positive feedback loops on each side of the phase change, which provides the hysteresis.
This gives another reason why transparency works against corruption. It provides an additional punishment for corrupt people (through ostrasizm by some segment of society), and an additional mechanism of judgement. Society might judge a person to be 'probably corrupt' based on information released because of transparency, even if due to corruption in the judicial process, the person is not legally punished; furthermore (and unfairly), society might deem a person 'suspicious' and punish them even if there is not enough evidence to convict them (could this be good for society at the expense of the innocent accused? after all, it leads to more punishing of the guilty. Maybe, but it could also allow corrupt authorities to frame their opponents, so it's not immediately clear if societal persecution of people against whom there is not enough evidence to convict is, on balance, helping or hurting corruption).
OTHER RELATED THOUGHTS:
CAN THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE BE CORRUPT WHEN THE REST OF SOCIETY ISNT? In theory, it possible for a society to be in the uncorrupt phase for most of society, but to be in the corrupt phase at the highest reaches of power. This is what a lot of 'information-distorting conspiracy theories' allege. By it's nature, it's hard to get data on how common this actually is.
Some reasons to think it is uncommon:
PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN LEAKY ABSTRACTIONS
In theory, a person could seem to be squeaky clean yet still be a criminal. And there is some evidence that some high-ranking criminals attempt to employ this strategy.
And in theory, most of society could be in the uncorrupt phase yet the most powerful people could be in the corrupt phase.
But in general this conflicts with the 'Principle of human leaky abstractions', which says that in practice deception and secrecy in human affairs tends to be imperfect. For example, in theory a person could lie about anything and pretend to be in any situation, and there would be no 'tells', and in fact this does seem to be the case for the best liars; but for most people, it is difficult to 'play a part' perfectly, some of their genuine thoughts and feelings leak through.
Of course, perhaps the people at the highest levels of power are selected to be such because they are among the very few who CAN lie perfectly, so this argument isn't conclusive.
PARADOXICAL SQUEAKY CLEAN-NESS/SHADYNESS OF HIGH PROFIT MIDDLEMAN OCCUPATIONS
Consider doctors, lawyers, financiers, and politicians. These are all professions that can make a lot of money. Doctors aren't middlemen, so drop them from consideration. The others all share certain attributes:
The 'paradox' is that these professions are regarded by many outsiders as non-squeaky-clean, yet many of the people working in them if anything place more emphasis on being squeaky-clean than the typical person. This is easily explained by the proposed theory. These professions make lots of money, so other things being equal, they are thought have a propensity to attract greedy people. In addition, even if they didn't have this propensity, they would have the propensity to make outsiders jealous of the money they make and hence more willing to believe that they are filled with bad people. For these reasons, there is a bias (perhaps justified, perhaps not) against the members of these professions in that people tend to assume that they are more likely to be bad. But this perception is very deterimental to the interests of the people working in those professions. Worse, many of the people in the professions themselves are probably squeaky clean types who don't want to work with colleagues who are not. Therefore, they spend extra effort to form self-regulatory organizations to help identify the non-squeaky-clean types. Since there is a reputational benefit, even those who wouldn't mind associating with non-squeaky-clean types join these organizations, giving a lot of power to the pro-squeaky-clean contingent at their heart. So paradoxially, because there is a danger of non-squeaky-clean-ness, these professions may end up more squeaky clean than others (a negative feedback loop).
Similarly with the secrecy, although here it's a positive feedback loop towards secrecy. These professions are looked at skeptically by the general public. So people who want to do business with them would prefer to do so in private, to avoid the reputational costs of being associated with presumed-non-squeaky-clean stuff. But (for this reason), unusual secrecy is viewed as a predictor of non-squeaky-cleanness. Which means that all the business being done in secret adds to the public's perception that something 'shady' is going on in this profession. Which increases the demands for secrecy, etc.
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a curious regarding Japan is that according to Wikipedia, "Yakuza are regarded as semi-legitimate organizations." [3]. Japan has a low crime rate and, according to Transparency International's indices, low corruption. How do these coexist with relatively greater tolerance of Yakuza?
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forensic labs that work for prosecutors, unsurprisingly, make some stuff up [4].
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2008/08/csoy.single.html provides some suggests for forensic labs:
" Forensic counsel for the indigent ((govmt pays for forensic scientists whose job is to work for the defence)) ... Expert independence. Crime labs, DNA labs, and medical examiners shouldn't serve under the same bureaucracy as district attorneys and police agencies. If these experts must work for the government, they should report to an independent state agency, if not the courts themselves. There should be a wall of separation between analysis and interpretation. Thus, an independent medical examiner would, for instance, perform and videotape the actual procedure in an autopsy. The prosecution and defense would then each bring in their own experts to interpret the results in court. When the same expert performs both the analysis and interpretation, defense experts are often at a disadvantage, having to rely on the notes and photos of the same expert whose testimony they're disputing.
Rivalrous redudancy. Whether the state uses its own labs or contracts out to private labs, evidence should periodically and systematically be sent out to yet another competing lab for verification. The state's labs should be made aware that their work will occasionally be checked but not told when. ... Statistical analysis. The results from forensic labs should be regularly analyzed for statistical anomalies. Labs producing unusually high match rates should throw up red flags for further examination. For example, in 2004 Houston medical examiner ... was found to have diagnosed shaken-baby syndrome in infant autopsies at a rate several times higher than the national average....
Mask the evidence. A 2006 U.K. study by researchers at the University of Southampton found that the error rate of fingerprint analysts doubled when they were first told the circumstances of the case they were working on. Crime lab technicians and medical examiners should never be permitted to consult with police or prosecutors before performing their analysis.... Ideally, state or city officials might hire a neutral "evidence shepherd," whose job would be to deliver crime-scene evidence to the labs and oversee the process of periodically sending evidence to secondary labs for verification. "
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Some contemporary examples of government systems which seemingly ran into trouble:
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease and Resource curse.
Some speculation on what went wrong in some of these cases:
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" ...the “3-out-of-3 law”, which would require officials to publish declarations of assets, taxes paid and possible conflicts of interest.... The Senate also blocked a law to grant independence to a new anti-corruption prosecutor....a proposed National Anti-corruption System "
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a guess what a minarchist wants is 'laws' for non-coercion, and 'regulation' for public safety, but not 'regulation' in the sense of optimizing society.
but given my idea that the government should not forbid untrustworthy actors and information sources, but should call attention (in mere informative way) to trustworthy ones, one way to put this is:
This government is a platform. It does not presuppose (a) shared morality or (b) shared goals. It is not intended to, by itself, (a) fix the world, (b) regulate excess or unethical behavior, (c) reform culture and morality. However, it DOES include mechanisms to serve as a platform that can be used by other organizations to accomplish these things.
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in lieu of or motivating stare decisis, the legal system should follow the 'principal of least surprise'; the law's effect should be what an ordinary citizen expects it to be.
Note: this dovetails nicely with my idea that the length of the laws should be limited so that schoolchildren all learn all of them, perhaps with some subject-matter-specific addendums for certain professions, eg an addendum for architectural safety requirements.
Note: the 'length of the laws should be limited' idea has probably effectively been tried in old scandanavian societies with 'law speakers'
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protect from coercion, but not from lies or scams. Caveat emptor.
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futarchy may be too complicated for most organizations, but imo vote-based prediction market is not
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in a vote-based prediction market, do we care if someone loses 100% of their vote (and so can't recover)?
Maybe we average their current 'prediction market multiplier' with a flat number (sorta like a Bayesian prior) to allow their voting strength multiplier to slowly decay (or regrow) back to 1?
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also, in a vote-based prediction market, what if someone 'wins' a 'bet' with someone else, but then the second person's Influence is taken away by others? Does the winner's won influence decrease?
i think no, this is not how it will work. There are not really 'bets' between people, there is just a system keeping track of how well someone has done at predicting. This system adjusts a 'vote multiplier' which is applied after counting a voter's Influence but before the votes are summed. Votes are not really transferred between winners and losers (the sum of post-vote-multiplier votes is not conserved), this is just a simplified way of imagining how the system is computing the vote multiplier. As ppl's Influence fluctuates, this affects the 'market prices' shown to others, but their 'vote multiplier' is only a reflection of their own performance.
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we could have a system combining chair proportional representation, and also time-lagged chairs, as follows:
Each election a new slate of 3 Chairs is elected. But then in the following cycle, the Chairs who actually serve, are: (i) the top Chair elected two cycles ago, (ii) the second Chair elected one cycle ago, (iii) the third Chair elected right now.
This would make it less likely that a large, transient surge in voter preferences would lead to the surging faction getting all 3 Chairs at the same time that they gain a supermajority in the legislature.
But it may be too complicated. And sometimes it may lead to weird outcomes where one faction gets all 3 Chairs when their popularity is declining at just the right rate to take them from the 1st spot to the 3rd in 3 consecutive elections (that's less of a problem than a surging faction getting 3 chairs during their surge though, because the declining faction gets its Chairs only when other branches are able to balance against them). Worse, a 1st-place faction with very good organization could engineer this outcome by directing the right amount of its supporters to vote for others for Chair at just the right times.
So maybe not. But maybe?
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for listing on the prediction market, perhaps there should be a 'relevancy to organization' criterion, eg predicting the wins of random sports teams can't happen? But this is subjective, the Chairs and their organization would have to decide it.
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if we are going to give ppl 'points' for participating in juries/councils, maybe they only get points for dissenting from what the majority wanted? But this seems too easily gamed.
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" "A lot of people stopped but nobody came forward to help," Tewari says. "He bled to death on the side of the road."
"The foremost reason was intimidation by police," he says.
"Oftentimes if you assist someone the police will assume you're helping that person out of guilt." ... Apart from the fear of being falsely implicated, people also worried about becoming trapped as a witness in a court case - legal proceedings can be notoriously protracted in India. And if they helped the victim get to hospital, they feared coming under pressure to stump up fees for medical treatment. ...
SaveLIFE? filed a case with India's top court to introduce legal protection for Indian bystanders and a year ago there was a breakthrough when the Supreme Court issued a number of guidelines, including:
allowing people who call to alert emergency services about a crash to remain anonymous
providing them with immunity from criminal liability
forbidding hospitals from demanding payment from a bystander who takes an injured person to hospital... "If someone had helped he may have been here today," says Anita Jindal. "Everyone told me they were scared of the police." ... Ravindran put the man in his car and drove him to hospital.The closest hospital gave him a bunch of papers to fill in before turning him away.
The next one swamped him with more paperwork before tending to the patient.
In total, he says, he spent three hours filling in these forms.
"They ask, 'Are you a relative?' The moment you say 'No', they don't do anything," says Ravindran.
"They wait for somebody to give them assurance that they will pay the bill. Valuable time is lost."
The elderly man finally received treatment once the paperwork was completed, but it was too late. He died of his injuries. "
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journalism for entertainment is a market failure. Need to support journalism as a public good but how to partition funding without corruption? Maybe make it mandatory for each citizen to purchase a news subscription, but make it their choice which one to purchase?
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only non-recourse secured debt agreements on individuals are enforcable -- other debt agreements are not illegal, but are not enforcable (however the agreement is illegal if it does not clearly indicate that it is unenforcable)
job contracts that individuals are not allowed to quit, or 'equity' agreements on individuals, are not illegal, but are not enforceable (however the agreement is illegal if it does not clearly indicate that it is unenforcable)
non-disclosure agreements which attempt to protect any information except for (either passwords/private keys, or individuals' private information), are not illegal but are not enforcable (however the agreement is illegal if it does not clearly indicate that it is unenforcable)
agreements that seek to prohibit competitive research, reverse engineering, price comparison, product or service reviews or analysis of any sort, are treated as a form of unenforcable non-disclosure agreement
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plea bargaining should only involve punishment not admission of guilt
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not just absolute free speech, but also absolute freedom to enable, facilitate, and support the communication of others
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under no conditions may the state demand a password or private key provided unless the private key secures access to a system which takes physical action, not merely communication. The state may at times demand the decryption of content encrypted by the private key, but not the key itself.
under no conditions may the state demand that a person cooperate in allowing the state impersonate them
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any unfunded mandates require (greater) supermajorities to pass in the legislature
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"
Data protection Opinion A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe Richard Stallman The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place
• Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation
Tue 3 Apr 2018 07.05 EDT First published on Tue 3 Apr 2018 07.00 EDT
Oyster ‘Convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ anonymity and privacy.’ Photograph: Debra Hurford Brown/PA
Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.
Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures. After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data Read more
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
The robust way to do that, the way that can’t be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.
Data about who travels where is particularly sensitive, because it is an ideal basis for repressing any chosen target. We can take the London trains and buses as a case for study.
The Transport for London digital payment card system centrally records the trips any given Oyster or bank card has paid for. When a passenger feeds the card digitally, the system associates the card with the passenger’s identity. This adds up to complete surveillance.
I expect the transport system can justify this practice under the GDPR’s rules. My proposal, by contrast, would require the system to stop tracking who goes where. The card’s basic function is to pay for transport. That can be done without centralising that data, so the transport system would have to stop doing so. When it accepts digital payments, it should do so through an anonymous payment system.
Frills on the system, such as the feature of letting a passenger review the list of past journeys, are not part of the basic function, so they can’t justify incorporating any additional surveillance.
These additional services could be offered separately to users who request them. Even better, users could use their own personal systems to privately track their own journeys.
Black cabs demonstrate that a system for hiring cars with drivers does not need to identify passengers. Therefore such systems should not be allowed to identify passengers; they should be required to accept privacy-respecting cash from passengers without ever trying to identify them.
However, convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ anonymity and privacy. We have already developed one: GNU Taler. It is designed to be anonymous for the payer, but payees are always identified. We designed it that way so as not to facilitate tax dodging. All digital payment systems should be required to defend anonymity using this or a similar method.
An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state
What about security? Such systems in areas where the public are admitted must be designed so they cannot track people. Video cameras should make a local recording that can be checked for the next few weeks if a crime occurs, but should not allow remote viewing without physical collection of the recording. Biometric systems should be designed so they only recognise people on a court-ordered list of suspects, to respect the privacy of the rest of us. An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state.
The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.
The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.
To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.
Finally, don’t forget the software in your own computer. If it is the non-free software of Apple, Google or Microsoft, it spies on you regularly. That’s because it is controlled by a company that won’t hesitate to spy on you. Companies tend to lose their scruples when that is profitable. By contrast, free (libre) software is controlled by its users. That user community keeps the software honest.
• Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation, which launched the development of a free/libre operating system GNU
Copyright 2018 Richard Stallman. Released under Creative Commons NoDerivatives? License 4.0 "
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absolute free speech by individuals (at least, w/r/t government laws), except for the privacy rights of individuals
no nondisclosure agreements enforced except for those protecting cryptographic secrets, or the personal privacy of individuals (even beyond their core privacy rights, see below)
core privacy rights apply only to individuals and include:
no intellectual property except for data protected by privacy of individuals
the government including the courts cannot compel anyone to breach their own or other individuals' core privacy rights
no "victimless crimes"; no regulations preventing people from making bad choices (e.g. risky investments, recreational drugs or phoney medications, unhealthy choices, etc).
Purported bad choices may be taxed; but the tax rate must not be so high so as to effectively prohibit the typical person from purchasing the good or undertaking the activity.
Purported bad choices may require additional fees paid for socialized health insurance, etc, but only in proportion to the expected negative value to the socialized system of the bad choice, which shall be conservatively estimated (eg erring on the side of the additional fee).
Purported bad choices may require licensing; but the course of study and testing required to get a license must (a) not be out of reach for the typical person, and also (b) must consume no more than 80 hours of time.
The sellers or providers of purported bad choices may not be regulated except for requiring them to make information disclosures and also to provide specified warnings to their customers. The penalty for compliance failures must not be so high so as to place the prospect of starting an independent business to sell or provide the purported bad choice good or service out of reach of the typical individual, due to the complexity of compliance or due to the risk of large losses deriving from the chance of incurring the penalties because of accidental non-compliance.
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stuff that Google says it wont do with AI:
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Technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm. Where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and will incorporate appropriate safety constraints.
Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."
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jurisprudence idea:
Supreme Court should only consider the form, not the content, of policy when deciding whether to strike it down
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government should have to prepare taxes for its citizens, and should have to provide free legal services for its citizens at least as regards following the law (government should not have to pay for legal services in citizen-citizen lawsuits). The general principal is that instead of creating a significant obligation to understand or compute or spend time on something that would otherwise lead to a strong desire to hire expertise or support, it should instead be forced to provide this expertise to citizens at no charge.
To make this more specific: a citizen should be able to ask the government whether any particular action is against the law. They should be guaranteed a written response within a reasonable amount of time. If the answer is yes, then the citizen can force the government to open a case against someone who has done that thing (assuming that the target isn't immunized, hasn't already been had a case open regarding this, etc), or, if it turns out that the answer is incorrect, the citizen can sue the government for the opportunity cost of not doing the thing themself. If the answer is no, then the citizen is immune to prosecution if they do that action. Furthermore, if the law places a positive obligation on a citizen (eg filing taxes), then the government must concretely answer any question about how to do that (e.g. "is this a salary or a stipend in this particular case?" must be met with possible further questions and then an answer, not "you'll have to figure that out yourself", and then the citizen is immunized if they rely on that answer and it turns out to be wrong).
A citizen should never be in a position where they want to comply with the law but have trouble doing so because they do not understand the law or do not have the time to do some computation or thought process that is required to figure out how to comply. A citizen should never be in a position where they decide not to undertake some legitimate activity because they cannot afford to hire compliance expertise. And a citizen should never be in a position where they failed to optimally arrange their affairs for compliance because they could not afford or could not find expertise to do so.
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harsberger taxes for non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods such as copyrights and patents. That is,
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https://ethresear.ch/t/call-out-assurance-contracts/466
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