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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

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Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#171

Post by martin-t »

pqtyw wrote: post #155
kjkjadksj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.

Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.

That's why term limits exist.

Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.

IMO:

1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.

2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.

3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#172

Post by mantas »

pqtyw wrote: post #157
mantas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.

And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides. e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep the…

So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.

And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#173

Post by FirmwareBurner »

TFYS wrote: post #166
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

>I don't have details.

No way. I'm shocked.

>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.

And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?

Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.

>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.

You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#174

Post by mantas »

missedthecue wrote: post #136
mantas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.

The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place. Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.

Still less work hands would mean change of balance between the capital and the labour. The changes in real estate pricing, which is one of the main expenses for labour, would be massive.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#175

Post by mantas »

pqtyw wrote: post #158
andrepd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy. It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system. In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media…

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#176

Post by missedthecue »

mantas wrote: post #174
missedthecue wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place. Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.

Still less work hands would mean change of balance between the capital and the labour. The changes in real estate pricing, which is one of the main expenses for labour, would be massive.

It doesn't really mean that because there isn't a forever fixed amount of labor being bidded on by the workforce. That side of the market is also dynamic. As population ages and then shrinks, labor demand will also shrink. If supply and demand shrink in tandem, wages don't increase.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#177

Post by ljf »

antisthenes wrote: post #119
ljf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...

I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest. It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer. Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasan…

Totally agree - their lives were no doubt hard and busy with back breaking work - my 'yes' was a 'yes it is a trope' - not a 'yes they barely worked'

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#178

Post by ch4s3 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #148
ch4s3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.

Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.

Here’s a narrow critique, you don’t understand that limiting campaigning privileges name recognition which is something only existing officials or celebrities will have.

In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.

Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.

I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#179

Post by rangestransform »

ericmay wrote: post #108
k__ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.

Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise. Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly. Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly…

It would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciates, people invested in business that provide something to scoring instead of land, and we could periodically tear down housing and rebuild it for cheap so that people can live in nicer residences

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#180

Post by pezezin »

k__ wrote: post #94
martin-t wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.

Japan is a really rigid country that values stability, hierarchy and following rules above all else. There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.

And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.

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