I think the answer to this is to adopt Land Value Taxes. This would naturally incentivize property improvement and dis-incentivize people from owning large swaths of unproductive land. Communities would grow upward before they grow outward. Infrastructure costs would drop significantly and communities (over time) would become more walkable.
The concept of God in Abrahamic mythology isn't about ancient beings that colonized the Earth. It's about a being that purposefully constructed our celestial sphere for our benefit. And most polytheist religions used gods as a proxy for natural phenomena that they couldn't explain otherwise (such as lightning, seasons, day/night, crop yield, etc).
It'd be fantastic if we could persuade some local governments to try this and work out the bugs. If it went well, it could be adopted by more and more locales.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims?
That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
Does tech legislation need to be kept up more quickly? I really like the default being no regulation and filling in where needed. It’s reactive by nature. I don’t know what broad legislation would have been put in place proactively to help tech be better governed (without specifying honing in on a specific business/industry after the fact).
I fear more of if the legislation process is too fast moving it become subject to mob mentality. Instead of #deletefacebook we may have gone straight to a knee jerk reaction of legislation that bans social media which I’m not sure I want to live in that world either.
In practice, first-past-the-post voting is dysfunctional bordering on evil, especially when combined with gerrymandering wherein politicians select their voters rather than vice-versa. The entire result set of this mess - two parties and their primaries - is deeply screwed up. The practical challenge (imo) is to explain alternatives concisely to voters who might want to modify how their voting system works. But there are now experiments going on here and there.
LVT wouldn't reduce mortgage or rent prices, but what WOULD reduce them is eliminating property taxes. and that's easier to do if you can offset it with another more efficient tax, like LVT.
Because Condorcet is still better than nearly all implementations of first past the post. But I think the commenter is getting at instant runoff voting methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
None are perfect but IRV is in use and effective. Tactical voting is still an option but at scale either obvious or difficult to organize without being obvious.
If you believe in the idea of wealth redistribution, there’s no better way than to come up with expensive products/services to sell to rich people who will gladly hand their money over voluntarily. There should be more of this.
These are very legitimate points. In my uneducated opinion, allowing other app stores to compete with Apple's would reduce the power of incumbents and allow Apple to compete on a level playing field. If another app store is better at filtering out spammy apps, or takes a smaller fee, then I just might install from their app store. It pushes Apple to improve their services than gouge as deeply as possible.
