All of Asgård's Comments + Replies

Seeing that this question is quite popular, but there's a lack of responses, I'll try to do some research myself and post answers in their own posts.

Hey, thanks for the insight.

The running in-line with a political party is a great point for anyone in America. The successes of third-party candidates are rare enough, that the rational first step to take is probably always joining one of the two parties.

4brendan.furneaux
Most Americans who would consider running for office are already a member of a political party.  Unlike in many (most? all?) other countries, where joining a political party is a separate act of engagement and commitment to the party, in the US it is a standard part of voter registration. Depending on the state, it may or may not determine which primary elections one is eligible to vote in, but I believe it always at least determines which primaries one is eligible to run in (i.e., a candidate in the Republican primary must be a registered Republican). However, registering, or indeed winning, as a primary candidate does not require the support or even permission of the party apparatus at large, and after the primary, the party is likely to support the winning candidate regardless of prior engagement with the party. Donald Trump is a high-profile recent example. However, in my most recent US state of residence (Oklahoma), most local politics are technically non-partisan; the party affiliation of candidates for positions like city council and mayor are not listed on the ballot, and the party apparatus is not involved.  Most of the candidates, like other politically engaged Americans, are in fact registered as members of one party or another, and it's not hard to figure out which one since voter registrations are public information, but they may not have any deeper connection to their parties, are not funded by them, and are not in any real sense representing them. Consequently, I would say that forming deeper ties to the party is not necessarily an important step at that level of politics (source: I have two friends who are city councilors for different Oklahoma cities in the 100k-500k population range.)  I'm not sure to what extent this generalizes to other jurisdictions. I would say that the most important thing in running for office is forming connections: to potential voters, volunteers, donors, endorsements, etc.  Engagement with the party apparatus is one way

The mapping of voting blocs seems like a really good idea, very actionable, and a great way to visualize who could be electing you. Putting their requirements, or encouragements out in a visual way, to weigh where the least action can cause the greatest gain.

I think that the situation I'm considering has an intensely powerful patronage network that it can relatively easily attach itself to. Other patronage networks will also be necessary.

Asgård180

Anecdotal evidence here, Germany (or at least one hospital in Germany) uses activated charcoal to combat alcohol poisoning.

Source: Youth/idiocy.

I guess my heuristic here would be looking to see if there are similar situations to the American situation in the world, and what they're doing differently. Europe has quite a few similarities (EMA to FDA), (440 million to 330 million), and so I'd look to Europe for comparisons. 

Anecdotally, buying a bundle of rapid tests in Europe was cheap and easy. They were available in every drugstore, and the ease/price of access was a huge advantage, which may be hard to overstate, especially if you're coming from a position of "high" access to the American ra... (read more)

I agree with a lot of this post, and think it's well written, thanks for overlay of Delta and Omicron numbers, I hadn't thought too much about the lack of variant tracing in America and what that means for their reaction times. 

I do agree with the gist, (though I don't know your family, their precautions seem very reasonable) that depending on your situation, it's safe to meet for the holidays. I disagree with your assessment of it being an increasingly large risk of an increasingly small harm, though maybe we just have different lengths of time that ... (read more)

Hey datscilly, thanks for your two comments. I could very well believe that the ACX-hosted Book Review and later research had tinged my thoughts on this. I still need to understand more of the Land Value Tax to see how something like that could be integrated into this idea.

I think the majority of BLM land could probably be bundled under a similar swath. Alternately, large chunks of land in Russia, Canada, Alaska, South America, etc. could maybe benefit from a similar program. Like I said above, the land has been classically unattractive, but remote work, g... (read more)

That's a great point, thank you for bringing the idea back down to earth.

Answer by Asgård10

For the BLM:

Pros:

  • Takes land that currently creates little to no value for the US Government, and immediately monetizes it, despite the actual sale of the land maybe being years off.

Cons:

  • If the value of the currency dips below the USD value of the amount of land that it's worth, then investors could buy it up and use it to get BLM land for cheaper than expected. This feels like it would be self-correcting.

In relation with other cryptocurrencies:

Pros:

  • A branch of the US Government would accept this coin as legal tender, which is a level of recognition sought
... (read more)

Thanks for the comment, lechmazur, I referenced Alaska in my question, but disqualified it from UBI status on the basis of it not being an "income", e.g. not being significant enough to live on, and also to a lesser degree, not being paid monthly or weekly, but yearly.

I do agree with you though, that Alaska seems to be the US State most oriented towards a UBI, the dollar value of their PFD would just need to increase by an order of magnitude for it to qualify as a UBI, imo.

2Lech Mazur
Sounds like a sensible distinction. When it comes to countries, I think Norway should be the odds-on favorite. Their sovereign wealth fund is at $250k per citizen.

The first point seems reasonable, but maybe moving there to bring about a UBI sooner could be seen as an equally valid reason for the move?

The second point is an interesting one, that I hadn't thought much about. Do you think there will be a general cost of living increase under a UBI? And thanks for reminding me about that fantastic book review!

7Viliam
There is some uncertainty in my opinion. First, as far as I know, we do not have experimental evidence what happens in long term under UBI. (The existing experiments were too limited in time and scope.) Second, I am not sure how much I understand the factors behind land/house costs, but I assume that Georgism is approximately correct, and that the obstacles against building more homes are more legal/regulatory than economical. (Which means that a change of law could change the situation on the housing market.) I assume that the reason for rising costs is simply "not enough houses" so the people auction for the existing ones, and the reason for not enough houses is that it is legally difficult to build them in sufficient amounts. If the following is true, then pouring more money to economy simply means that people will have more money to auction against each other; that is, the costs of housing will rise. (Like, if 1200 families are fighting over 1000 houses, and new houses cannot be built fast enough, then even if you made all of them billionaires, ultimately some of them would not have enough money to buy a house.) But it is not obvious how will this interact with UBI. Maybe the prices will rise just high enough that you cannot afford your own house on UBI alone (or on UBI plus the average wage), and then they will stop. The regulatory reasons against building more homes are the following: First, people who already own houses in the city, do not want every remaining piece of grass in their neighborhood to be replaced with new houses, so they will elect politicians who vote against this. Second, there are rules saying that a house must have at minimum a certain number of square meters, etc., which on one hand sounds like a good rule that prevents horrible homes from being built, but on the other hand it also puts a minimum price on a home, which some people can't afford. (From the average voter's perspective, it is a choice between a good house and a house that su

Thanks for the response, Viliam! 

The fact that FSP had a pledge wasn't something I was aware of, which is a relatively clean solution to the coordination issue. Maybe a financial cost/reward to cement the pledge? If you don't move after x years, you pay y amount (perhaps increasing from year to year?), which is distributed to all the members that have moved already?

I agree with the rest of your points, especially how moving just to vote somewhere else can feel very marginal in comparison to the financial/social costs. (Although I think that New Hampsh... (read more)

Makes sense:

  • Tech brings in a lot of per-capita income
  • Tech brings in utopian, disruptive voters
  • One of the most progressive states

Definitely enjoyed this, would very much appreciate a few more posts of this style. The relatively basic solution I implemented is as follows:

I created a dictionary in Python for the total successes. For each stat (cha, str, etc), I found the number of successes and total attempts at each score(1-20). Dividing the successes by total attempts gave me a rough success rate for each stat score.

Then, I set my character up as a dictionary, and iterated over it, increasing each value by one and seeing what the change was for the success rate from that increase. A

... (read more)
2simon