The only purpose of an economy is to satisfy the material needs of the people. In theory, at least. In practice, businesses spend a major amount of their time and energy trying to create new needs. So consumers work a lot to earn a lot to buy a lot, stuff they don't really need. And then they die. It's all a tremendous waste. If consumerism was somehow taken away, many people would perceive their lives as void, and that is scary.
Every first time smoker will tell you that smoking tastes awful. Nicotine doesn't even produce a high worth speaking of. Still many people smoke. The only explanation I have is that smoking is presented as "cool" by the advertising industry, at least cool enough to try it often enough to become addicted.
Childhood obesity is not related to hours of TV consumption as was previously thought, but to the number of junk food ads viewed. How can these advertisers live with themselves? The lowest of scum. Ads targeting children are clearly immoral and should be illegal: children are not mature enough to see through the lies.
Moreover, advertising is a very conservative, slowing factor in today's
society: If you want to sell a product, you will have to allude to values,
feelings, ideas and images that are well-known and well-liked by the majority,
thereby reinforcing them. New values have an extremely hard time to enter the
mainstream in this climate.
Example: No one would try to sell a car with a
picture of a fat woman, since, at this point, only a minority of men prefer
these women. Therefore, you see young and slim women everywhere and the beauty
ideal can hardly ever change, if at all.
In Germany, advertising by lawyers and doctors is not allowed. It works perfectly well; nobody seems to have trouble finding a lawyer or a doctor.
It is a myth that advertising provides us with free TV, radio, and
web sites. The advertising budgets of major corporations are
enormous, and everyone who wants to compete with them has to spend at
least as much. These costs are of course handed down to us, the
consumers. Advertising raises demand and therefore, by elementary
economics, also raises prices. Not only do they fill our brains with
crap and steal our time, they also make us pay for it.
It thus
makes economic sense to avoid products which are heavily
advertised. Buying such a product implies financing things you don't
want: radio ads, TV commercials, web banners, junk mail and
billboards.
Advertising is offensive in at least two ways: philosophically and personally. It is philosophically offensive, because it uses tried and proven propaganda techniques such as omissions, half-truths, suggestive associations and appeal to emotions, but rarely any hard verifiable facts. Its stated objective is to widen the gap between perception and reality. Every serious thinking and perceiving being should try everything to reduce that very gap.
Advertising is also personally offensive. Take your average car commercial: a happy family, driving in some unpolluted landscape without any traffic congestion, everybody is happy, nice music in the background, and the text "Exercise your liberty. Drive Ford" or some such nonsensical bullshit. This ad quite openly tells me: "You are a fucking moron. If you buy a car, you don't care about its price, features, mileage, theft and accident statistics, insurance rates etc.; you will buy it simply because we played some nice music while we showed it to you. In addition, you are way too stupid to see through our little tricks, even though you have probably analyzed many ads like these in fifth grade. Wow, you are so fucking dumb. Now go ahead and buy the Ford."
Many broadcasters and magazine publishers today are in the business of selling attentive audiences to advertisers. This affects the media content dramatically: advertisers like to pay for consumers who are in a positive, optimistic, buying mood. Critical thinking, depressing thoughts, deep story lines: not wanted.
Advertising is an unstable, exploding system: the more advertising there is, the more it is ignored and the more of it is needed in order to get the message across. There is no end. All paid for by the consumers.
My main argument, however, is the following: We use up an unbelievable amount of resources (thereby ruining the environment) without significantly elevating our level of happiness. I blame the advertising industry for that. The one message contained in each and every commercial is:
A ban on advertising could be enforced very easily: simply allow businesses to sue competitors over infractions. The "crime" of advertising cannot be hidden very effectively... Businesses would still be allowed to publish the specifications of their products and services in widely available listings, similar to the yellow pages. Magazines would continue to publish reviews.
If you feel like me, please support the following organizations:
Whenever you are about to buy a product and find yourself remembering an advertisement for it, it's a good idea to choose another product. You don't really want to pay for the incredible lengths this company went to in order to sneak into your brain. This is especially true for branded products, which should be boycotted. Anything that weakens the power of brands, like producing, buying and wearing counterfeit versions, is laudable.
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Laws against prostitution have the sole effect of providing profits for organized crime and stigmatizing the working men and women and their customers. The often very bad working conditions of prostitutes are a consequence of non-existent labor laws and missing collective bargaining rights combined with the impossibility to get help from the police if abused or cheated on. The pimping laws have the effect that every man who lives with a prostitute has to fear overzealous prosecutors.
The effects on public health of legalization accompanied by regular, mandatory and free health checkups (as in Nevada) for all prostitutes are also quite clear. For instance, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among Nevada brothel prostitutes is lower than that in the general population. [Note however that the situation of prostitutes in Nevada is rather exploitative; an insider report appeared recently on the web.]
Even in countries where the legal status of prostitutes is satisfactory, such as in the Netherlands and Germany, discrimination and stigmatization continues and accounts for many psychological problems. Often the women are forced to live a double life and to lie to their friends and family about their true occupation. This must stop. Especially the happy customers need to speak up.
In a world where more and more work is being done by machines, computers and robots, both supply and demand of personal services such as prostitution are bound to increase.
Married women should recognize prostitutes as their natural allies. Many women cannot or do not want to satisfy some sexual wishes of their husbands sufficiently often; many husbands don't even want to voice those wishes. As a consequence, many marriages are held together because the man has an outlet in prostitution, and many other marriages break up because the man does not. It is simply a fact of biology that a well-off fifty-year-old male is attracted to, and attracts, younger women, and will often leave his fifty-year-old wife for a girlfriend unless he can unproblematically buy sexual services from those younger women.
Prostitutes perform an important service in society and should be treated accordingly. There is nothing morally wrong with prostitution: society already allows and encourages the buying and selling of food, shelter, entertainment, compassionate conversations, and medical services. Buying and selling of sexual services is no different. Providing direct pleasure to another human being is noble, not immoral. Good prostitutes are able to fake emotions convincingly, and not even that is immoral: psychotherapists, actors, singers and undertakers do the same.
Some people believe that something as valuable and central to human life as sex should always be given away for free out of love. They forget one thing: food is in fact much more valuable and central to our lives than sex, but rarely given away for free.
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Laws against soft drugs are not justified since these drugs are no more dangerous than the legal ones. In fact, nicotine is much more addictive than marijuana, and alcohol is much more toxic. It is true that marijuana smoke is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke, but the average consumption per user is much lower and marijuana can be ingested and is then completely harmless.
The argument that marijuana be an entry drug to harder substances is void: Every junkie will tell you that she started out very early with nicotine and alcohol, not with marijuana. The only danger with marijuana is that it is usually bought from a dealer who also sells hard drugs, which makes the transition easy. That is however not a problem of marijuana itself but one of its illegal status.
The demonization of a relatively harmless substance has the effect that people don't believe any drug information anymore. "Maybe it's all a hoax and heroin isn't that bad after all?"
Specially trained doctors should be allowed to prescribe hard drugs to persons who are demonstrably addicted to them and who would then have to consume them in the doctor's presence. This would have the following consequences:
I wrote the above text in the late 1990s. Since then, there have been several very positive developments:
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People who go into medical research because they want to do some good for mankind are lying to themselves, and deep down, they must know it. Five minutes of clear thought would reveal that they could save many more lives outside of the medical industry. These are unpleasant thoughts however, because intelligent people almost always prefer well-defined, "hard" problems ("How does HIV infect T-helper cells?", "Is there a violence-gene?") to the more important "soft" problems ("How to make sure that people in Ghana have access to and use condoms?", "Why are there children whose only successful role models are criminals?"). "Soft" problems are of course much harder than "hard" ones, and that's why people shy away from them.
The only way to justify the current practices of using the results of medical research is to take the morally indefensible position that first world lives are worth more than third world lives.
An immediate, sensible demand is that poor countries be allowed to manufacture patented drugs royalty free for domestic use. Drug companies wouldn't lose any money since nobody in these countries is able to pay regular prices anyway.
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Sex among relatives results in a slightly higher probability of producing disabled children. For good reason, we don't outlaw sex among people carrying genetic defects, even if it might result in a disabled child; outlawing incest is wrong for the same reason.
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It is a misnomer, because there is no such thing as "recycling". It is all downcycling. If you start with a piece of paper, you "recycle" it, you'll end up with paper of lower quality. You "recycle" again, you'll have still lower quality. And after that, you can't "recycle" any more at all. It's the same with all other materials. Furthermore, this downcycling process eats up tremendous amounts of energy.
Downcycling is not only an insufficient means of preserving resources, but given the way it is advertised, it is detrimental in allowing people to have a good conscience when they put their newspaper in the recycling bin instead of throwing it away. In truth, they should still have a bad conscience. Consumption is the problem and it has to be attacked. We have to learn to live with less stuff. Downcycling is no solution, it only puts sand in our eyes. The major message should be "Use less stuff" and not "Always put your stuff in the downcycling bin".
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Climate is an unstable system, and nobody can predict the precise extent and consequences of the change. Since gambling with planetary systems is a bad idea, prudence requires that we drastically cut down our greenhouse gas emissions.
All this has been known for at least 25 years, a couple of treaties have been signed, but basically nothing has been done. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. It seems certain that we won't stop burning fossil fuels until all of them have been burned. Apparently, neither nations nor individuals will take concrete actions just to avoid some nebulous future risk.
Many countries will be harmed by the effects of global warming while a few others will benefit. We need a global treaty ensuring that the harmed countries are properly compensated. Every couple of years, a commission would determine every country's cost or benefits resulting from climate change, as well as the degree to which the country has contributed to the problem (taking into account the country's total emissions over time, not just the most recent emissions). These numbers would form the basis for international compensation payments. Such a scheme would create true incentives for the countries to reduce their emissions.
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While it is easy to say "these people are bad and immoral and if they don't stop their behavior, they deserve to be punished", one should first imagine how difficult it would be for oneself to completely give up one's sexually arousing stimuli. For obvious biological reasons, sexuality is the strongest motivating force in the mind. So I don't see these offenders as very culpable in a moral sense, since they did not initiate the wiring of their sexuality.
How then to deal with rapists and child molesters? Obviously society needs to be protected from them. I can imagine technical devices to do so, maybe a tiny camera affixed to their head to allow remote supervision, along with a device that lets the remote supervisor apply electric shocks. One person can easily monitor a dozen offenders, with the price being a fraction of normal prison/therapy costs.
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It would even be possible to build such a video game into every car, so that the car won't start unless you pass the game. Of course, the simulated situations should keep changing for this to work. The games could be regularly updated via radio.
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There is nothing more uncool than doing what you're told to do. That's why prohibiting smoking and health warnings on packages are all completely useless. An effective anti-smoking campaign simply needs to tell teenagers that they want to smoke because the cigarette advertising industry suggests that it's cool. Just deconstruct a couple of cigarette ads. The very establishment, hated Corporate America people in suits, meet in conference rooms and discuss how best to portray smoking as cool to teenagers. Once teenagers realize this, smoking cigarettes is dead in the water.
Smoking weed will flourish however.
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Once this prohibition is in place (as it now is in several jurisdictions), an interesting new business model arises: the smoker restaurant or bar, with waiters and waitresses carrying oxygen tanks or gas masks.
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The process should be opened up in a radical manner; referees would have to publish their signed reports and recommendations. In this way they could receive academic credit for reviewing work, they would have an incentive to file solid reviews, and others could check the reasons for why an article was rejected.
The scientific publishing system, still largely based on paper journals, is broken. The real work is done by authors, editors and referees, all of whom are unpaid. The publisher sells the end result for large amounts of money. The work is then hidden away in libraries and is not made freely available to the public who funded the research in the first place. The internet is largely bypassed. Researchers in poor countries are cut out of the loop entirely.
Both problems can be fixed with one stroke:
extend the preprint archive arxiv.org so that
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The correct way to finance higher education is the one invented and used by the German private university Witten-Herdecke: students don't pay anything until they are finished with their studies and have acquired a well-paying job, at which point they are required to pay 10% of their disposable income to the university for a period of 10 years. In this way the poor and rich are treated alike, those who profit most from the education also pay the most, and the university has a natural incentive to produce graduate well versed for the job market.
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You put somebody in prison for several years, they lose their job and outside friends and meet several other criminals in a violently charged atmosphere. What do you think they learn during this time? What do you think they will do once they get out? Society spends extraordinary amounts of money on crime school.
Better and cheaper punishments are corporal punishment, forced labor, branding and closely supervised parole.
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The above story applies one-to-one to the question of reparations for past slavery. Obviously the descendants of slaves must be compensated by the descendants of slave owners.
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Here's my proposal about fighting corruption: make the offering of bribes legal. Accepting a bribe carries a hefty fine. Anyone who brings evidence of an accepted bribe (say hidden video footage) receives the fine that the corrupt person has to pay.
Many people will want to trap authorities and offer fake bribes; accepting a bribe all of a sudden becomes quite dangerous.
Of course, one somehow has to come up with non-corrupt officials who administer this mechanism...
The reason that corruption is comparably rare in rich countries is this: government employees make good salaries, have secure jobs, and can look forward to generous pensions. All of this they would risk by accepting a bribe, and the average bribe is normally too small compared to the risk. And there is a positive feedback loop: in a society where bribery is relatively rare, an official caught accepting a bribe has little hope of evading punishment by offering a bribe. All of these effects are reversed in poor countries, so widespread corruption is to be expected.
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I still can't believe that during the Somalia adventure, no one really asked why these people had nothing to eat but all carried snipers. Who bought those, who provided the money, who sold them, who produced them, and who profited?
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Since it is almost a general rule that better paid jobs are also more pleasant, (only exception I can think of: prostitution, see above) and since government dictated salaries don't work, the logical conclusion is to have a much more progressive income tax system.
The current income tax system in virtually all countries is based on fixed tax brackets. But the income distribution changes over time, because of inflation and other factors, and the brackets have to be constantly adjusted. A more rational system, with the very desirable tendency of leading to a more equitable income distribution, is the following: an individual's tax rate is determined based on the difference between the individual's income and the average income of the lower 50% of the population. The larger this difference, the higher the rate, according to some specified formula. With this scheme, rich people, who are typically politically influential, have a direct personal interest in improving the financial lot of the lower half of society. (Note that using "average income" or "median income" in place of "average income of lower 50%" is not as good: the former because extremely high salary outliers disproportionally affect the average, and the latter because the median is not affected by improving the lot of the worst off people.)
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There is no question that these projects will become more and more successful: they have already largely succeeded in agriculture, they are currently about to succeed in manufacture, using robots, and before long they will succeed in the service sector as well, using artificial intelligence. Eventually, most people will be dispensible and their work won't be needed anymore. Once this development has become obvious to economists and then to journalists, populist politicians will offer the simple solution: tax all automated labor and distribute the revenue to the jobless masses as permanent welfare payments. Obviously these politicians will be elected. The only other solution would be the socialist one: the means of production are declared property of society at large, and profits are distributed to the new owners, i.e. to the jobless masses. In both scenarios you end up with a huge welfare state.
What will people do if their work is not needed anymore, and their material needs are taken care of? Presumably they will cultivate skills that tend to make them interesting to potential life partners and friends. Study philosophy to be able to engage in intruiging conversations, learn how to cook well, perfect your gardening skills, write engaging stories or video games, discover some interesting new fact in science, learn some foreign languages, etc. Anything that might attract some admirers. Large parts of society will presumably just lazily enjoy life, and there is nothing wrong with that. After all, that was the whole point of technological progress.
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Taxes are used in every society for two reasons: financing of common tasks such as infrastructure, education, judicial system, administration, defense and social services on the one hand, and behavior modification (cigarette taxes, booze taxes, fuel taxes) on the other. It is important to separate the two.
The revenue from behavior modification taxes should never be used to finance common tasks, because otherwise the state gets into a conflict: on the one hand it wants to eliminate the offensive behavior, but on the other hand it wants to maximize the tax inflow. Both goals will suffer. Therefore, money from behavior modification taxes should always be reserved for projects that serve the same purpose as the tax, e.g. anti-smoking campaigns in the case of cigarette taxes and improvements of public transport in the case of fuel taxes.
The taxes that are intended to finance common tasks shouldn't be "punitive" at all; a behavior that is desirable from the perspective of the common good should not be taxed. Obviously, this cannot be achieved completely, but I believe we could do a much better job than we do now. Currently, we mainly tax salaries of employees and profits of businesses. It is however not a good idea to discourage people from working and making money.
Here's my proposal: we remove all income taxes and instead increase the gift and inheritance taxes to 100% each. While you live, you are perfectly free to make as much money as you can and enjoy it fully; once you're dead, your wealth will be confiscated and used for the common good. This way, you can't complain that someone took something away from you, since dead people don't complain (and don't have property rights). There's another positive effect of this scheme: the children of rich people will have less of an advantage in life than they enjoy now; fewer people will be able to live off their inheritance and more will have to actually work for their living. The playing field will be a little more level.
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The penal code should be a thin booklet written in simple language that could be taught in school. It should come with an explanatory manual that gives good reasons for all laws. Why exactly is incest among consenting adults illegal? I want to know.
Lawmakers should be forced to come up with a defendable reason for every criminal law they enact. Isn't that the least thing to ask for?
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This article was clearly a consequence of horrible experiences in Nazi Germany, when many Jews couldn't get out simply because no one was willing to let them in.
The perverse provision adopted now, which let the German authorities immediately send back any refugee entering Germany from a "safe" country (all countries surrounding Germany have been declared "safe", of course), would have as consequence, if adopted by every nation, that only the immediate neighbors of crises would let refugees in. This is unjust for two reasons: firstly, those countries are typically extremely poor while Germany is extremely rich, and secondly, they are certainly no more responsible for the crisis at hand than other countries are, so they should not have to bear all the burden.
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Personally, I am happy about the low birth rate, because I think the world population is already way too large. The solution to the above birth rate/social security problem is obvious to me: formulate a decent immigration policy to attract workers from other countries. Such a policy does not currently exist in Germany.
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The fact that death rows are closely guarded in order to prevent suicides shows clearly that vengeance combined with sadism, and not protecting society, is the underlying motive of capital punishment. Not only do we want her dead, but we want to enjoy ourselves in the process, and we want to determine time, place and manner of the show. However, once we have decided to act like barbarians and let all our darkest instincts surface, why not go all the way? Why stop at psychological torture? Why grant her a nice painless death by lethal injection? I propose that, in order to fully accommodate our desire for revenge, to maximize the deterring effect and to place the highest possible value on innocent life, murderers should be dragged naked through the streets and then slowly tortured to death in public.
Some argue that killing a killer is cheaper than housing her for the rest of her life; others argue the opposite. The question is completely irrelevant: the very discussion shows that society has already acquired the mindset of a killer, namely to think that it can be worthwhile to kill a human being for financial reasons. That is precisely what murderers do, and we have no moral right to punish them if we consider doing the same.
On the side: the US has signed and ratified an international treaty (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) which explicitly bans, among other things, the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by minors. Nevertheless, the US continued to sentence minors to death and executed them, claiming that this be the democratically expressed will of the American people. This from a nation that demands human rights all over the world. The practice was finally stopped by the Supreme Court in 2005. Mentally retarded people were also routinely executed, which annually got the US into the Amnesty International report about nations violating human rights. The Supreme Court stopped this practice in 2002.
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These laws are just about the worst that could happen to the US. Most criminals are active when young and settle down later. With this law, they will settle down in prison, for some thirty years on average. Prisons will turn into nursing homes, thereby wasting tremendous amounts of money, money which is desperately needed for work on the socio-economic root causes of crime in America.
Not to mention the obscenity of putting a sixteen-year-old three-times burglar away for life without parole. This clearly violates the US constitution which prohibits excessive punishment as well as the UN universal declaration of human rights.
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"Campaign Finance Reform" is a very popular goal, but it is unclear how to structure it, since the Supreme Court ruled that any cap on campaign spending would be an impermissible restriction of free speech.
Here is my proposal: any candidate for a public office is given a choice: they can either accept public funds but then cannot use any other money, or they can forfeit all public funds and are then allowed to spend as much as they want. In the second case, they have to file precise statements about the dollar amount spent on their campaign. All competitors in the election will then receive that exact same sum from the government. That way, rich or well connected candidates don't have any advantage any more; choosing the second option is not in their best interest, in fact, it will make them unpopular among voters.
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So what was the war about? Pure global strategy: the US wanted a foothold in a strategically important region (important because of the oil reserves and the closeness to Israel); they did not want to tolerate a defiant dictator in that region. It was a war of aggression with the aim of regime change. Therefore it was clearly illegal, a violation of Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations, as was pointed out by Secretary General Kofi Annan among others. (The UN Charter was basically authored by the US after World War II.)
I am not surprised that the Bush administration would engage in an illegal war of aggression; they do not consider international law binding, as has been shown subsequently by their brushing aside the Geneva Conventions when dealing with war prisoners. I am however very surprised at the stupidity of it all: apparently nobody anticipated that the Shias, after decades of suppression by the minority Sunnis and supported by Iran, would demand power, and that the Sunnis, with all the infrastructure of the old Baathists, would not yield quietly. You take away Hussein and you get civil war: that much should have been obvious to the strategists.
I believe there is also another, more sinister motivation for the war. Bush wants to divert money from social programs towards his supporters, large contractors and the defense industry. After he pushed through immense tax cuts, the war costs nicely drove up the budget deficit and the public debt. Every billion spent on the war cannot be spend on Medicare. Every helicopter shot down is money in the bank of Lockheed Martin. Bush knows that eventually the budget will have to be balanced, and with the now almost complete taboo on increasing taxes and cutting defense spending, this balancing can only be accomplished by cutting government services. The war is thus an integral part of his long-term strategy of reducing the size of government entitlement programs. He followed a similar strategy as governor of Texas: cut taxes, increase spending on pet projects, and wait for the inevitable cutting of social programs by the legislature.
It is clear that the war cannot be won. The Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan and the United States lost in Vietnam and in Somalia and will lose in Iraq. If people are so determined that they will happily die for their cause, and mothers will happily send their sons to die, then your laser-guided cruise missiles are nothing but pointless expensive toys.
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There's now a unique window of opportunity where Esperanto could be adopted as official language of Europe, and maybe eventually of the world. It is a designed language with numerous advantages over existing languages: simple and logical grammar, simple and logical pronunciation rules, vocabulary derived from several European languages, helpful user communities all around the world. It is ideal as a second language for everybody. Right now, English is the de-facto second language for everybody, but English is hampered by a ridiculously low level of correlation between pronunciation and spelling. (They actually have national "spelling contests" for kids in the US: they shout out a word and the kids have to guess its spelling.) It misses the whole point of a letter-based script: by hearing a word, one should be able to spell it; by looking at a word, one should be able to pronounce it. English also has far too many words; for almost every concept, there are two words, one with germanic roots and one with latin roots.
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Simply removing all tariffs does not necessarily yield efficient production: it rewards nations that impose few social and environmental costs on businesses, which has nothing to do with efficiency as defined above. A downward spiral towards lower and lower social and environmental standards is clearly undesirable for everyone but the capitalist.
A system of international tariffs which rewards efficiency and does not punish high social and environmental standards is needed. It could be installed by bilateral or multilateral agreements. The key is that a nation is only allowed to levy a tariff against another country's good if the industry in the producing country has a lesser burden of social and environmental costs than the importing country; in this case, only the difference in those costs between the two nations may be levied as a tariff.
Tariffs are never negative, which implies that an industry from a (rich) country with higher "burdens" has a slight disadvantage compared to the native industry when it tries to export into a poorer country. In this way, the internal markets of poorer countries are somewhat protected against industries from richer countries which have access to technology not available locally.
The question remains whether salaries should be treated as "social burdens" in the this scheme. They should: lower salaries do not mean higher efficiency in the above sense and are therefore not desirable.
All comparisons of the various "burdens" should be carried out taking into account the purchasing power of the respective currencies. The daily currency exchange rate is too arbitrary and does not convey the relevant information for our purposes. When using this scheme, it would be best to levy the tariffs in the producing country's currency so that the tariffs would not have to be adjusted whenever the conversion rate changes.
Some international arbitrating agency would be needed to resolve disputes arising from this scheme of tariffs. Once some countries create this agency and sign according tariff agreements, there is a clear incentive for other countries to join: they would then be able to improve their social and environmental standards without jeopardizing their position on the world market.
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As a first tiny step towards labor market efficiency, it should be possible for two persons from different countries to exchange their nationalities if they so choose. In the spirit of capitalism, this exchange could be linked to a payment from one party to the other. Everybody wins. See Citizenship exchange for more details on and arguments for this proposal.
Rich countries dictate that poorer countries are to enter the world market and concentrate on the export of resources and agricultural goods. It is extremely immoral that those same rich countries ignore the rules of capitalism when convenient. The European Union pays high subsidies to its farmers, resulting in large over-production. To keep the internal prices in the union high, they then pay export subsidies to get rid of the over-production. This drowns the world market in twice-subsidized agricultural goods that poor countries cannot possibly compete with.
The solution is obvious: stop all subsidies and mandate ecological agriculture which uses little chemicals and no gene-modification. Agricultural yields will fall, keeping prices high and eliminating over-production. The playing field on the world market will be level again.
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In every war, deserters are the most moral actors: they follow the more basic and important ethical rule of never killing other human beings and reject the more artificial rule of always obeying orders.
The UN should actively encourage desertion in every war; deserters should get a UN medal of honor and some money and an internationally recognized hero's passport so that they can resettle wherever they choose.
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Such an institution, elected by the one-person-one-vote rule and provided with the monopoly on legal military force, is the only hope for a peaceful community of nations. If you hit me, I won't hit you back but will turn to the police and the courts instead. We need to achieve this level of civility in the international arena too.
A world government could also mediate between the rich and poor countries of the world. Obviously, the poor countries would have the majority in this government, and that is just, because they have more people. This is how democracy works.
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The fact that a full-time worker in a poor country can barely feed his family while one in the first world who puts in the same amount of effort lives in incredible luxury would not be considered unjust by conservative economists. They would look at the situation locally, asking questions like "Is the poor worker forced to work at that factory?" or "Does the poor worker get the agreed-upon salary?" or "Has the rich worker gotten his advantage by cheating?" and so on, and if they can't find any wrong actions, they will be satisfied and won't detect any injustice. Leftists however see a structural injustice in this situation. The problem with this injustice is that no one in particular can be held responsible, since no single action can be blamed. Moreover, in many situations, the only way to remedy unjust situations is to take unjust actions. Conservatives take the easy way out of this dilemma by altogether refusing to acknowledge that a situation in itself can be unjust.
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The medal count at the end of the Olympics has got to be the most idiotic thing ever devised. So China has a quarter of the world's people. Obviously it will get about a quarter of the medals. So what? Who the hell cares?
I propose instead a division of people along objective and unchangeable lines: blood type. Each of the four blood types gets its own anthem and flag, and those shall be used at the ceremonies.
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Marriage is an obsolete institution. At a time where divorces were impossible and women could not earn a living, marriages were needed to ensure that all women were financially supported. This is no longer the case; there is no need anymore for a government issued license that sanctions only one of the multitude of possible living arrangements.
The reason most people marry today is not financial but emotional: one tries to bind a loved one as tightly as possible. The whole concept of modern marriage is designed to make separation difficult, embarrassing and expensive. Divorce is synonymous with failure. Many people are invited to the wedding ceremony in order to create psychological pressure: "Before so many friends and family, you promised to stay with me -- and now?" In addition, divorce is costly and complicated. The underlying assumption however, that making a breakup difficult will increase the likelihood of a long and stable relationship, is clearly wrong. If the relationship doesn't work out, then it will break, sooner or later. If you're married, it will be later. And more painful. But it will happen.
However, I may be wrong here. Recent psychological research shows that people are happier if they have few options and if there is little possibility of a change. For instance, people sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole adjust better to prison life than those who retain the possibility of parole; the more options a retirement fund offers, the fewer people will contribute, etc. While we all prefer situations with options and hope, these are actually not conducive to our happiness. In this sense then, a truly unbreakable marriage may be a smart move. Today's marriages however are easily disolved. How to get around this? I propose that a couple write a prenuptial contract stating that if the marriage ends for any reason, both partners must burn all their money (or donate it to the Republicans or some other distasteful cause) and must give up all their children for adoption. That way, the couple will have taken the divorce option completely off the table and should live a happier life afterwards.
Personally I find a relationship much more exciting and also more romantic if it can do without any outside pressure whatsoever. Both partners should be completely free to leave every day. They stay together simply because they prefer the presence of the other over absence. And this has to be won every day anew, over and over again. It's great if it works, and if it has worked for a while and doesn't anymore, then it is no catastrophe. All security in matters of the heart is illusory.
At a wedding ceremony, one typically promises to love the partner forever. Such a promise is clearly immoral, since one has no control over one's future feelings. It is as if I promise you that it won't rain tomorrow.
For these reasons, I have a problem with gays who fight for the right to marry their partners. The goal should not be to get even more people into government-approved relationships, but to do away with these approvals altogether. Gays should exploit their peculiar situation and mock the institution much more than they do now. I propose that a group of gay men pair off with a group of lesbians and then stage a huge mass wedding party, complete with official marriage licenses and all, simply to make fun of the whole thing and to collect the tax breaks. Or will the government only issue its license if you promise to have sex regularly? How often? What position? Would Ronald Reagan have been stripped of his marriage license? Questions everywhere.
I recognize however that everyone living in a rich country has an obvious moral duty to marry someone from a poor country to circumvent immigration laws and provide the unjustly disadvantaged with an opportunity to improve their lives and financially support their families. This duty is even more pronounced in the case of older persons whose retirement benefits will be inherited by a spouse: clearly these persons have an obligation to marry a young person from a poor country. (See also Duties Towards People in Poor Countries.)
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It could and should be called arrogant to believe that one's own genetic material is so perfect that it should be transported into the next generation.
Your three year old child prefers books lying on the floor. You prefer the books organized on shelves. There is no rational reason to choose one scheme over the other, yet you use your power to enforce your preference. You clearly have no moral right to do so. "Might is right."
Do prospective parents never fear that one morning they'll wake up and realize that they do not particularly like their child? Or that their child wakes up and realizes that it does not particularly like them? You can't divorce your children. Some shared genes and a vast power difference does not always make a good basis for love.
Suppose doctors tell you that your child is going to have trisomy 21 (mongolianism, Down's syndrome), a very common genetic defect. Trisomy 21 people are among the happiest humans, but severely handicapped, and yet you will have to care for the child all your life, then put it in an institution when you get too old. Do you abort the child?
Do you know how your personality will develop over the next 15 years? Do you know how your partner's personality will develop over the next 15 years? Can you guarantee that your changed self will still love your changed partner in 15 years? If not, what are you going to do: stay together so that your child has a fake family experience, or break up so that your child has a true non-family experience?
Planned Parenthood offers cheap vasectomies and sterilizations.
If you feel the need to care for a child, you should look into adoption, especially adoption of sick children and children from poor countries. That way you're doing real good and reduce suffering in the world, without contributing to the problem. The problem, the central problem of our time, is overpopulation.
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The debate, therefore, is clearly won by the abortion opponents, but only because the abortion proponents refuse to argue properly, on ethical terms. Here are my arguments in favor of abortion:
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Some of this admiration has since evaporated. I am appalled by the vigor with which gays demand government approval for their relationships in the form of marriage licenses: the avantgarde joining the boring mainstream. Instead of getting straights out of the military, they fight to get gays into the military! When a Republican hammers homosexuals in public, gays whine "Discrimination!" -- why not simply hammer back on the idiot and his infantile religious beliefs? Many gays also show a fixation on externalities (such as body shape, dress, interior design etc.) which I lack completely and which bore me to no end.
I am completely dumbfounded by the widespread societal disapproval of homosexuality, and don't understand at all where it comes from. As a male, every single male homosexual makes me happy: less competition for me.
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Now this is all quite abstract, but you can easily make it very concrete: ask any male friend of yours what he would prefer, amputation of both legs or amputation of the penis. So far, I have always received the same answer. And usually the answer comes very quickly.
Complete chemical castration, extinguishing all sexual thought and desire, is a different matter though. I think if you paid me $1 million I would go for it. It would be a nice serene life.
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Here's my personal HTML style guide:
ALT=" description in the "<img>" tag.
<title> for your
documents. The title will be returned by search engines and will show up in
people's hotlists.
My WWW Reader's guide:
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The vast majority of knowledge and literature is stored in our [university] libraries and won't be digitized for quite some time to come, if ever. We need to teach people how to "surf a library", because surfing the internet is trivial in comparison.
Freshmen here at UCSB get a non-mandatory 1-hour library tour; the internet seminars are about 7 hours and extend over several weeks. The priorities are wrong. It should be working knowledge for every student
Why not have a "Library Hunt" just like the "Internet Hunt"? The person who gets the answers first wins a cookie or something.
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(In an earlier version of this rant, I mentioned MuPAD, supposedly a free computer algebra system just as powerful as Maple or Mathematica. It turns out that MuPAD, while gratis, was never truly free in the liberty sense. The makers of MuPAD have recently removed all gratis versions. This shows that we should never settle for gratis software: it has to be free software that gives you the source code and lets you modify it.)
User support for free software is generally much more snappy than that of commercial programs. Newsgroups, FAQs, WWW homepages, and even personal email to the author are available on a regular basis. Usually bugs will be fixed instantly. If not, the end user can try to fix them themselves, because they always get the complete source code for the programs. Having the sources liberates the user from being dependent on the program author.
You don't read much about these achievements in the media. I suspect it's because there's no advertising money to be expected from free software, so why praise them? (One more argument against the financing of journals by advertising here...) We should write more letters to the editors of computer magazines asking why they refuse to include free software in their reviews.
The successes of the free software movement suggest that one basic assumption of capitalism, namely that quality can only be created if a profit motive is involved, is wrong -- they forgot about enthusiastic volunteers creating a culture where one's worth derives from what one gives and not from what one owns. The neo-liberals love to repeat their lies: "You always get what you pay for" or "There's no free lunch", never supporting them with any evidence. High quality free software proves them wrong. GNU hackers of the world, unite!
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The only way we have to predict what others will think and feel and do are stereotypes: simplified models of what people of a certain type typically do in certain situations. Stereotypes aren't bad: they're often the only thing we have. We usually use our stereotypes without being aware of it: we call that "acting intuitively".
But how do we acquire stereotypes? Many important situations are exceedingly rare in real life. How often have you fallen in love? Maybe 10 times? That is no data collection to write home about. But you have easily seen a thousand fictional movie and TV scenes of someone falling in love. That's where you got your stereotypes about how people falling in love are supposed to behave. Your brain is not smart enough to distinguish between those 10 real scenes and the 1,000 unreal ones: it's all mushed up into one big stereotype. Those 1,000 unreal scenes were written by authors who don't have any more experience with the matter than you or me: they just made that stuff up. Your stereotypes about these central matters of life are thus largely built on scenes that were made up by people; there is no reason to believe that they resemble real life. Your whole internal model of people is poisoned by fiction. The more fiction you consume, the less you can trust your intuitions.
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There is only one proper way to relieve them of their money: order them to drop it out of a plane in small used bills over the favelas of São Paulo.
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I'll work with the following definition: you are completely convinced (CC) of a statement if you would agree to the following bet: you will receive $10 if the statement is true, but you will be slowly tortured to death if the statement is false. The bet will be decided by a fair, sympathetic and all-knowing judge, no pettifoggeries.
Here's a list of my CC statements:
Statements that, for me, don't rise to CC status:
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I don't actually believe that we are "converting" mass into energy. Instead: there is nothing but energy; "hard matter" doesn't really exist. All the fundamental particles, electrons, quarks etc., are point particles and have no size. So how could they have mass? They are really nothing but bundles of energy. The equation E = mc2 does not give the amount of energy you can extract from a given mass--it tells you the mass of a packet of energy. Of course, there are also packets of energy that don't have mass, e.g. photons.
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Such a simulation would be started at the big bang and would then proceed with accelerated time. If the equations are correct and the simulation is good, life will eventually appear, inside the computer's memory. A tremendously exciting experiment, and more and more scientists will want to repeat it to check out their own pet theories. Eventually, universe simulations will become cheap enough to put them on every pupil's desk, for educational purposes.
Of course, you already see where I'm going here. It is pretty likely that we ourselves, right now, are sitting inside just such a simulation on some school kid's desk. The remaining problem is how to contact the kid who created our universe. Let's just hope that he didn't smoke anything.
Appendix: Let's quickly estimate the probability that we are sitting inside such a simulated universe. In the worst case, a computer that simulates a universe in real time takes up about as much matter and energy as the simulated universe contains. In that case, the total number of civilizations in all the simulated universes is of about the same order of magnitude as the number of civilizations in the real universe (since scientists will not stop before they have at least one simulation running which is big enough to generate at least one civilization, even if that means zoning off ever larger unused portions of the real universe for their huge computers), and the likelihood that we ourselves are simulated is therefore about fifty-fifty. If it turns out to be possible to simulate a universe with significantly less matter and energy than the simulated universe contains, then the likelihood becomes much bigger. All this assumes that the simulated universes look very much like the real universe, but this need not be the case. After all, once we know everything there is to know about our universe, "creative cosmology" will be one of the few remaining sciences.
Simulating universes creates a host of interesting ethical questions. Clearly, once there's life in your simulation, you are not allowed anymore to switch it off permanently. However, temporary interruptions are fine: the inhabitants of the simulated universe wouldn't even notice. What if you see that there's needless suffering in your simulated universe--are you allowed or even required to intervene? God might have asked Himself this question from time to time.
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The robots will either displace us (like we displaced the Neanderthals), or they will keep us around (like we keep dogs around). Maybe our best hope is to form a symbiosis of some sort with the robots for a while (like the dogs do with us). It really doesn't matter that much in the long run: they are the ones who will do stuff; we will be onlookers at best. They will be the next evolutionary step.
You may not like that scenario; nervetheless, it will happen without any doubt. I give it 150 years at most. Your great-grandchildren will see it happen.
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Actually, I'm not too interested in writing that novel. Instead, I want to know what would happen in the following ten years, how would people react? It's ultimately a question in mass psychology. Here are a couple of thoughts:
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Traditionally, we see these mathematical theories as descriptions of reality: the mathematical entities stand in a one-to-one correspondence with the entities of reality, and the theory is such that the mathematical entities behave just like the corresponding entities of reality. But what if there's only the mathematical theory, no correspondence, no reality beyond the math? A consistent mathematical theory whose solutions show an extremely rich behavior, that's all, that's the universe.
But mathematical theories are purely abstract, just ideas, you can't touch them! How could they give rise to the hard stuff around me that I can touch? Well, you may not be able to touch a mathematical theory, but one feature of a theory can easily "touch" another feature, once the concept of "touching" is properly defined in the context of the theory.
There are lots of consistent mathematical theories out there, obviously. And I want to claim that they are all created equal. It's not that some consistent theories describe reality while others are just nice ideas: instead, each and every consistent mathematical theory gives rise to its own universe of sorts, with most of these universes being utterly boring. Right now, as we speak, we are lucky enough to experience the feeling of being part of the solution of an exquisitely complicated, elegant and exciting mathematical theory.
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Infinite space with infinitely many stars. Wow. Consider the consequences: the probability that a given star has a planet that can support life is presumably pretty low, but if you have infinitely many stars, you also have infinitely many stars with life-sustaining planets. The probability that a given planet looks like the earth is admittedly extremely low, but if you have infinitely many planets, you will have infinitely many planets that look like the earth. The probability that on such an earth-like planet somebody hacks together a cheesy web site containing weird opinions is certainly very very very low, but if you have infinitely many such earth-like planets...
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A widely held and intuitive belief is that of free will. Being a human involves constantly making decisions; it is obvious to us that we could have decided otherwise, that we were free to do so, in fact that we are free to behave in any way we like.
I am convinced that this intuition is false. There is no room in physical law for free will. There is, however, room for probabilistic information processors, and that's precisely what we are. We take in information, we have some other information stored, we have some hard-wired goals and a reasoning apparatus, and using all that we make decisions and act on those decisions. "Freedom" is the name for the internal state of a probabilistic information processor while it is processing information and coming to a decision. Our freedom is the freedom of a chess computer before it has made its move.
Some people believe that doing away with free will is dangerous since it also gets rid of all moral responsibility. Yet that is not true. A chess computer that decides to make a move that turns out to be bad will be punished with a strong refutation; if it is smart enough it will learn from this and won't make the same mistake again. A probabilistic information processor who knows that it will be held responsible for the consequences of its decisions will tend to behave responsibly.
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The messages of the old and the new testament are almost completely opposite. The only admirable messages I can find in Christianity are the teachings of Jesus: love everybody, especially your enemies, don't retaliate, don't judge, live poor. Just like the prescriptions of Communism, these are important ideals but unrealistic because they don't take human nature into account.
God claims to punish those who don't believe in Him, and reward those who do. Even if I wanted to, I could not believe that there is a pink elephant outside the door. I can imagine it, but I cannot make myself truly believe it. My beliefs are simply not under my control. God punishing me for my beliefs or disbeliefs is fundamentally unfair.
Even the character and some of the teachings of Jesus are questionable. He urges his disciples to drop everything and follow him, without any concern for the welfare of the families left behind. At one point he is hungry and gets angry at a nearby bush for not bearing any fruit. He then prays to God to destroy the bush as punishment, claiming that everything a believer asks for in prayer will be fulfilled. (He does not explain how contradictory requests of believers are to be resolved.) He equates adulterers and divorcees, apparently wishing to force people to stay in unhealthy and unhappy marriages for life. He never speaks out against slavery or torture (nor does anybody else in the bible).
When meeting a self-proclaimed Christian, it is always a good idea to ask "So, you must really look forward to your death, right?" After all, Christians believe that they will spend eternity in a blissful union with Jesus, God and the angels. Beats taking out the trash, doesn't it? Yet, strangely, Christians seem to cling to life just like anybody else.
In general, someone who had to work hard to overcome many obstacles deserves more respect than someone to whom everything was freely given. By this measure, God does not deserve any respect: he never had to overcome any difficulties whatsoever; he woke up one morning, found himself to be all powerful and all knowing, and proceeded to create the universe and mankind. Big deal. Furthermore, considering the natural disasters and atrocities of history, it is clear that his creation was a piss poor job.
I reject Buddhism on three grounds: its fundamental premise "Life is suffering" does not agree with everyday experience, the infantile notion of reincarnation does not have a shred of evidence behind it, and the concept of Karma was obviously invented to make people behave. (There is however a benign and abstract reading of the reincarnation and Karma doctrines that I agree with: everything we do, everything we set in motion, every thought we put in other people's minds has consequences beyond our lifetime; the matter making up our bodies is constantly recycled to become part of other bodies.)
I'm not sufficiently familiar with other religions to criticize them in any meaningful way. In general I'm an atheist in the sense that I strongly believe that no personal creator-god exists. [I do however find the programmer-created-simulated-universe scenario quite likely.] I am also certain that no all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good being exists: the tsunami put an end to that notion.
My own religion is a blend of some ideas from Spinoza, Buddha and Teilhard de Chardin. For me it fulfills all the tasks of a religion: it makes me feel good, it makes me behave, it provides a frame of reference. The central idea is to deemphasize our individuality and instead to consider ourselves as part of one big system, the universe:
The old Greeks postulated atomism: the world is composed of indivisible parts called atoms. Teilhard de Chardin provided an important addition to this theory: there is only one atom; the universe itself is indivisible. Whenever you try to separate one part of the system from the rest, you inevitably make mistakes at the boundary.
One could regard the brain's neurons as individuals, but it is much more fruitful to treat them as interacting and mutually dependent parts of a whole. In a similar sense, I want to regard humans (and all other intelligent beings) as the brain cells of the cosmos. It is incorrect to say that human scientists are starting to understand the cosmos: rather, the cosmos is becoming self-aware.
Once one takes this perspective, one immediately feels a deep sympathy for all beings and the whole system. The left hand may not feel the pain of the right hand, but it will surely never hit the right hand and will help it along whenever it can. Jealousy becomes impossible: no brain cell would ever complain that some other brain cell found the answer first.
One can even argue scientifically that human beings cannot be strictly well-defined individuals: the set of atoms that make up your body is constantly changing, and the matter that you are is different from the matter that you were. Not even your thoughts are truly yours: they are influenced by countless ideas of others you have read and heard. And from the viewpoint of Quantum Mechanics, the history of the universe is nothing but the time evolution of a single giant wave function subjet to Schrödinger's equation; that wave function encodes everything there is to know about the universe, all in one single self-interacting entity.
The truly big heart loves every single quark in the universe. Like the mystics, I see all particles as vibrating, spinning and quivering with ecstasy.
Our task (and the meaning of life) is to keep improving our institutions, knowledge and technology, with the goal of approaching the remote logical end point of a good, omniscient and omnipotent entity, akin to Teilhard de Chardin's omega point.
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The cockaigne is surrounded by fences and high walls, to keep out the poor and downtrodden. Clearly you must help people over these walls.
There are a number of simple ways to do this. If you feel a need to marry, you should always look for marriage partners in poor countries. As a result of the marriage, your partner will get the opportunity to obtain a valuable passport. Furthermore, if your partner is younger, they will inherit your retirement benefits which would otherwise go to waste.
However, marriage helps only one person. It is possible to help many more, by assuming fatherhood of children of single mothers in poor countries. Such declarations are accepted as valid by most countries (unless the true father steps forward, an unlikely event) and the children then get a right to your passport, ensuring a bright future.
Lastly, you can adopt children (or, in many jurisdictions even adults) of poor countries who will then be able to receive your country's passport.
It is your duty.
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Whatever your job, chances are that you do more harm than good. In one way or another, you are probably contributing to the growth of consumption, to the widening of inequalities between nations or people, or to increased demands in the world of work. Just because someone pays you doesn't mean that your work is desirable from a global perspective.
Try to leave as small a footprint as possible: sit still, think, don't buy stuff, save your money, write a will benefiting some charity, don't procreate, prepare yourself for death, retire early, kill yourself when the time is right. Thank you.
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Dying is a different matter though. Realistically, most of us face a slow death in a nursing home, with slight dementia and various slow growing cancers encroaching. Towards the end, you won't even be able to tell where it hurts anymore.
The only rational alternative is a well-planned suicide. This is a perfectly noble way to die: the human being takes charge, makes a decision, and acts. Unlike a leaf that floats in the air, passively tossed around by the wind, until it finally falls to the ground.
When you have decided that the time is right, sell your belongings and give away your money to charity. Then have your best friend organize your last couple of weeks. This party is of course to be financed by credit cards, consumer loans and loan sharks: the only way to permanently win in life is to die in debt and without possessions.
Planning ahead makes sense: life insurance policies will pay in case of suicide if taken out at least two years before the event (in the U.S. at least).
The last party is going to be the best party of your life. Whatever you fancy will be present: friends, women, drugs, food, music, tropical setting etc. The idea is that all your life you can look forward to those last couple of weeks.
The exact manner of suicide is of course a matter of taste. I suggest slowly increasing doses of heroin; each dose increase will cause a new type of ecstasy. In the end you will die with a smile on your face: the last moment of your life will have been the best one.
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That is primitive. A monitor should act exactly like a window, and this is possible: every pixel on the screen should not simply be a light bulb that shines light in all directions, but instead should be replaced by a whole sheaf of individually addressable thin light beams which point in different directions. These beams probably would have to be implemented as low power lasers to prevent diffraction effects. A picture is then given by specifying a light color and intensity for every addressable beam of every pixel sheaf. Hopefully, the eye is easily fooled and not too many beams per sheaf are needed.
To save energy (and computation power in the case of scenes that are rendered on-the-fly), the display could track the viewers eyes and switch on only those light beams actually visible by the viewer.
With a screen like that, the viewer will get a full three dimensional impression (without any special glasses), will be able to move the head slightly to get a better view of some details, and will be able to focus on everything they choose. Just like looking through a window.
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In order to encode messages in the telephone ringing, you start again with a (rejected) collect call, and then you call the other party's number and let it ring a certain number of times, according to the message you want to transmit. The other party knows that they shouldn't pick up the phone immediately after a collect call but should count the rings instead. Again, a catalog of messages has to be established in advance.
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Our noses and ears are just as primitive as snail's eyes. It's all but impossible to make out the precise location and shape of the emitting object. What we need are portable odor lenses and sound lenses.
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All this is ridiculous. We need an internationally standardized low-voltage DC outlet that can be connected with a simple cable to all these devices. No chargers anymore, just one cable.
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It seems obvious that we need video goggles with a little motion sensor built in (just like the iPhone). Then the laptop would know when I move my head, and it could always display the proper portion of my desktop, giving me a virtually infinite desktop. That would be much better and cheaper than three LCD monitors standing side by side. Even better would be a goggle that tracks eye movements, so one could look at a huge screen without having to move the head.
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Optionally one could attach the whole fixture to a fabric sack for carrying the bottle, with attached carrying straps. Occasional moistening of the fabric will then cool the bottle by evaporation.
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Option trading is basically gambling on future prices, and many use it as a substitute for gambling. The problem is that right now, you can only bet on tomorrow's price of a given stock or resource; for gamblers, the time resolution needs to be much smaller to keep the adrenaline flowing.
So I propose option trading with much smaller time resolution. It should be possible to bet on the price of gold ten minutes from now, for instance. It's clearly legal, and it would satisfy most gamblers. There's even a conceivable real-world use, for instance when traders want to insure against price fluctuations while performing a complicated transaction.
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The phonetic system used in Western languages, once properly implemented, is clearly superior: for every concept one needs to learn only the pronunciation; the spelling can then largely be deduced. Similarly, when reading an unfamiliar word, the pronunciation of it can be deduced from its spelling.
However, Asian languages are much more elegant than most other languages in their almost complete avoidance of grammar. There is really no need to distinguish between "I", "me", "mine", between "give" and "gave", or between "dollar" and "dollars"; everything can be unambiguously deduced from the context: "He yesterday give two dollar I." All these grammatical rules one has to learn when studying a language like German are pointless icing on the cake.
I think we should combine the advantages of the phonetic spelling system of Western languages and the lack of grammar of Asian languages and create an artificial language with clean phonetic spelling and Asian approach to grammar. This would then represent the simplest way to communicate and could eventually become a second language for every person in the world.
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This is of course completely mistaken. The goal of any treatment is to cure the disease, and if the placebo effect can help, all the better. We need research about how to maximize the placebo effect. Eastern practices and the medicines of prescientific people will surely be helpful here, since they often employ the placebo effect exclusively. Reassuring rituals, encouraging speech, behavior modification suggestions, some psychoanalysis etc. will all have to play a role.
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We need a global medical database on the internet. If you enter the characteristics of a patient and a bunch of symptoms, it should give you the possible diagnoses, with associated probabilities. It should suggest tests to distinguish between those diagnoses. Then it should suggest drugs and treatments, the cheapest and most effective for the current condition. Whenever a doctor has administered a drug, they enter the symptoms, treatment and outcome into the database, so that it can be updated in real time. No doctor can possibly have all this data in his head.
The job of a doctor then changes drastically: their first duty is to cleanly describe all relevant symptoms in a format the database understands. Their second duty becomes to maximize the placebo effect, as described above.
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Mathematicians often redefine concepts with slight variations (for example, the notions of 'ring', 'algebra' and 'compact space' do not have universally accepted definitions). When reading a mathematical article or book, one always has to check the particular conventions used by the author. Worse, there are no databases that one could query in order to find out whether a given statement has already been proven.
Mathematicians should get their act together and fix these shortcomings. A formal language needs to be specified (which shouldn't be a problem, given that mathematicians invented the concept of formal language) and an extensible list of "contexts" should be provided (e.g. Gödel-Bernays set theory, first-order Peano arithmetic etc.). Every newly defined concept must provide a context and receives a unique identifier; the concept's definition can refer to the identifiers of other concepts in the same context. Furthermore, every concept definition may provide a list of suggested common names. In addition to definitions, the database should also be able to store theorems, again with identifier and common name.
Once a universally accepted formal notation and definition database exists, journal editors could require all authors to refer to these definition and theorem identifiers in their articles and submit their new definitions and results to this database as a condition of publication.
It should be possible to query the database for any specific concept or theorem, or for a list of known theorems connecting two or more concepts. Ideally, the database frontend would incorporate some limited proof intelligence, so that it could detect that a query theorem is equivalent to a theorem in the database, or is a simple consequence of combining several theorems in the database.
In the long run, mathematical papers should be written in a semi-formal language so that computers with access to the math database can automatically check the correctness of all proofs (similar to the Mizar project).
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For this to work, every cell phone needs to know approximately where it is, so that calls can be forwarded in the right direction. But I don't think GPS is necessary; regular cell tower triangulation should be sufficient.
Obviously not every cell phone owner has to participate in this mesh network, but those who don't won't get the benefit of free calls.
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To break into private people's computers, the weakest link seems to be the wireless router. These typically run outdated operating systems that are never updated, and have an open port for administration. If there's a tiny bug somewhere in the router's software, one can enter the router via wifi. Once you own the router you have complete control of the traffic flow to and from the connected computers.
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I argue that the Turing Test is not very useful in practice, does not properly capture "thinking capability", and Artificial Intelligence researchers should not strive to build a computer that can pass it. This is due to the following three objections:
The above objections against the Turing Test are readily answered by the Boldt Test:
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