Tangential: I'd love to vote for a political party whose only thing is to copy stuff that works in other neighbor countries. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel or is too proud or something, idk.
You're basically describing Volt Europa. They're having some success with that approach in Germany and the Netherlands, primarily at the municipality level
The last election must have been around the recent middle-east events (framing it purposefully neutral), because I remember I had some conflicting thoughts about their stance. I can't (honestly) remember if I voted for them then or not - but I strongly considered it, that much I know.
Edit: Writing this out I think, I'm probably part of the problem. Voters should remember who they voted for and benchmark the results against their campaign pledge. Keeping politicians responsible with the little power we individuals have.
Doing that benchmarking is far more important then whether you actually voted for them last time. If you do the former then I don't think you're part of the problem.
Furthering the tangent, its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence, but in the US one party’s adherents pick a fairly random rights issue and vilify you if that’s not your particular top cause at that random point in time. It would be one thing if that approach worked to gain influence, but it doesn’t. Instead they then say “what!? All of our core demographics picked the party with character traits that are irrelevant to the job and that wasn’t a big enough turn off to prioritize our completely random not even opposite cause? you’re the problem!” when they could focus on causes that individual people actually prioritize. form coalitions. gain influence.
But, fortunately they are just losing supporters as people opt out of fealty to any party. Independents are the largest voting bloc now, although they have partisan leanings, they are underrepresented.
> its annoying that parties’ primary goal is to gain influence
Inevitable consequence of a representive democracy. Parties are chosen based on electability, which is merely a proxy for good policy. This means parties that don't optimise for electability at the cost of good policy will eventually be outcompeted by those that do.
(It's for this reason Graeber sometimes jokingly (?) called representative democracy "elective aristocracy".)
haven't looked into the link, but the way you phrase it, I'd be worried you're creating a system that only gets gamified. Trust should not directly feel like a reward.
You're right about gamification risk. What if the formula is transparent though: Your contribution = Your Stars = Your Influence?
Traditional systems reward activity (posts, comments, time spent) which are easy to game. But measuring actual contribution outcomes - did your help work, did your advice get adopted - seems harder to fake.
Still gameable probably, but at least people would be gaming by actually helping others?
Sure, but kids don't drink as much these days anyways anymore. At least in Germany, and we have drinking at 16 year old. I'm not at the age, but I wouldn't know an alternative to hang out at weekends. I mean, I do, but I can't think of a popular alternative. In my teen years people already haven't had any hobbies. With social media this surely has gotten worse.
I agree. On the other hand, I don't want to give away all the responsibility. There is plenty of space for doing sports or going in nature. Art is pretty affordable in cities. Public transportation is pretty cheap (at least for the youth and in Europe). But still, I agree.
Same here: I agree. On the other hand, it's a pest upon humankind that we can't leave public spaces clean and respect public property. We need money to pay people to make nice things, because apparently there is no critical mass that cares about the community. It's always individuals that burden it on their shoulders. And that's obviously not sufficient. Solution: money. Yeah, I hate it too.
> On the other hand, it's a pest upon humankind that we can't leave public spaces clean and respect public property.
Toxic individualism and an intolerance towards collective ownership is killing community. We should not blame humankind on a problem easily solvable by hiring a few people to clean and fix things. Somehow, this (the public bearing any cost whatsoever to have and maintain high quality public property) has become unacceptable to the public!
It didn't become unacceptable. The general public does pay already.
What becomes more and more unacceptable is the way those who already have a lot avoid to participate in this collective maintenance.
Besides that, there are things you can't solve with money. Sure you can sand "a few people" to clean up a place but the fact that people didn't use the trash bins (if the community was able to afford some) won't go away. It will create more and more costs while the collective money to patch over this will get less and less.
There will be a point when it snaps and some will be surprised it did because their bubble was kept clean all the time. They paid extra for it and your kids are not allowed on the loan.
I see that they come as a bundle. But I am not so sure about "educated". You yourself hinted that it's inherent to humankind. People have been "educated" in several different ways all across the globe and I wouldn't know where to look to see a difference.
You need to be greedy and selfish to be really successful in this system and being successful in our system begins in school and ends at your workplace where it spoken out loudly and clearly for you to learn. If you are successful, you can buy more things for yourself. Maybe even a few things others not only, don't have, things they might not be able to get at all because they're unique. You don't even have to do anything with those things. Just put them in storage and let them generate you even more money so you can buy even more things.
As someone who grew up under Socialism, this system we have here in the West is a paradise and hell in one.
Generally I agree with you. From the article it seems as if the chat bot has led them there. Maybe one of those "Are you further interested in A or B?" questions. If that's the case, there might be more nuance to it.
There was a very pretty girl who sat next to me in English class in high school, who I had a crush on, who grew up in an upper middle class family that was going through a terrible divorce.
Last I heard she's a professor of the Quechua language in Hawaii and lives alone with a large dog and has probably aged out of her fertile window. I can't prove that her family's divorce had anything to do with the trajectory of her life and her not reproducing, but on average there is a correlation.
I seem to be misunderstood here. You could read OPs comment as if low income people should not get kids. I kinda doubt this is what he meant, but I wanted to reassure.
I completely resonate with what you said, but I don't see a connection to what I wrote/meant.
Different person, but broken can happen across class and take different forms. However, lower income families tend to mean higher rates of child abuse and more single parent households. Single parent households have been linked to lower educational and economic attainment and higher incarceration rates. So while it can happen across the spectrum, it does seem to have some correlation.
I know. But is the conclusion here, that low income people should not get kids? If that's the point OP made (which I doubt, but still asked to reassure), I disagree wholeheartedly.
I don't think there was any proposal given. Seemed like they made a statement that some people shouldn't have kids if they can't be responsible. I don't think there's any ethical way to delineate and enforce that.
