Evernote recommendation seconded. It's a really neat tool (I particularly like the auto text recognition in images making them searchable).

I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical.

One of the things I particularly like about the idea of competitive government is it gives you something practical to do now as an individual. Look around the world and consciously pick a country to live in based on the value offered by its government. Surprisingly few people do this but the few that do have been enough to give us the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.

I think being an immigrant gives you a different perspective on things. I've spent most of my productive adult life in a country where I pay taxes and have no right to vote. This somehow makes the myth of democracy less potent for me.

I found the discussion between Moldbug and Robin Hanson interesting because whilst Robin Hanson has lots of interesting ideas he does not write terribly well. He communicates his idea clearly but there is no style to his writing. Contrast Moldbug (or Eliezer) and see the impact of interesting ideas expressed with eloquence and you being to appreciate the power of language.

I wonder if I give excessive weight to Unqualified Reservations because it has such greater facility with the English language than is typical of the blogosphere. Interesting and controversial ideas expressed with rhetorical flair seem to directly trigger the reward centres of my brain.

Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?

I'm not aware of a single central hub for such discussion I'm afraid. There's academic work in the area of development economics which looks at countries around the world and tries to identify what traits of governmental institutions seem to correspond with economic growth and prosperity. This is where Paul Romer and his charter cities idea is coming from.

If you want some really out there but intelligent discussion of related ideas you might want to check out Unqualified Reservations. Maybe start with the gentle introduction series. Mencius Moldbug could be described as many things but concise is not one of them so you're looking at a fair bit of reading there.

Arnold Kling blogs on this topic a bit as well, he has a particular interest in the idea of 'unbundling' government services.

If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I'd expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.

Think of competitive government as a meta-theory of political mechanisms in the same way a well functioning market economy represents a meta-theory of producing efficient organizations rather than a theory of how to run an efficient organization. The question is how to structure things in a way that there is an incentive for good governance. If you get the incentive structure right then good governance will tend to outcompete bad governance. The individual experiments would not be atheoretical but the structure under which they operate is intended to be agnostic about what the best approach will prove to be.

Many of the people you'll see talking about competitive government are libertarian leaning and so would have their own personal ideas about how to run a government but rather than privileging their own pet theories they want to put them to the test against other ideas about how to run things. A Thousand Nations emphasizes that traditional ideological opponents could in theory both get behind the idea of competitive government as it would give them the opportunity to go and test out their own utopian ideals without having to convince anyone else.

Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?

I don't see how this is any different in principle from the question of the value of experimentation and innovation in general. Many technologies ultimately prove to be market failures but I think the evidence is pretty compelling that economies that follow a free market model and 'waste' resources on ideas that don't pan out have a better track record of producing net benefits through innovation than economies that attempt to centrally plan innovation.

I just find it disheartening when people don't want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.

I don't believe advocates of competitive government are generally doing this. They just don't believe that their own ideas should be given special privileges over everyone else's.

Are you familiar with the background to patrissimo's comment? Competitive government is what he's getting at in the comment you linked.

Physics provides certain tactical advantages to moon colonists. (Citing fictional evidence I know but as far as I can see the advantages are likely to be real).

I would be happy to donate money for development.

There's a lot of tools out there for task / goal tracking. I'd suggest spending some time researching them before thinking about developing a new one. Beware of falling into the trap of chasing after the elusive perfect system rather than just getting in the habit of using something good enough.

I quite like remember the milk but my main problem is still the whole getting into the habit of using it consistently part. It's pretty flexible in terms of attaching extra information to items. It's not hierarchical but I suspect that's overrated anyway. It does support a very flexible tagging and 'smart lists' system which is better than a hierarchy in some ways.

I just make a couple of fried eggs for breakfast usually. Takes less than 5 minutes and can be done in parallel with making my morning cup of tea. Advance preparation looks like overkill to me - why not just get up 3 minutes earlier?

Are you claiming that this was actually the plan all along? That our infinitely wise and benevolent leaders decided to create a panic irrespective of the actual threat posed by H1N1 for the purposes of a realistic training exercise?

If this is not what you are suggesting are you saying that although in fact this panic was an example of general government incompetence in the field of risk management it purely coincidentally turned out to be exactly the optimal thing to do in retrospect?

This looks like a fully general argument for panicking about anything.