"I'm always serious." - Dr. Egon Spengler
676 karma · joined April 6, 2015
I think a direct democracy will still need a president and congress to handle many aspects of governance, like military action, state secrets, etc. My hope would be though that a direct digital democracy would take some of the decisions away from congress and put those decisions in the hands of the people. But certain aspects of government, particularly the military and judicial system will always have to be centralized.
While there would be security and privacy issues to overcome with a digital direct democracy, at least it would not be as susceptible to corporate capture as our current representative systems of democracy.
I live in LA and a few years back there were several articles written about TB spreading within the homeless population. With all the resources that the US government pays to monitor its population to try to prevent a terrorists from using things like biological weapons, you would think that the US government would be concerned about members of the homeless population that are carrying TB or MDR-TB. The infected homeless are basically untrackable since they most likely don't have bank accounts, home addresses, etc.
If you told the CIA that you knew of an untraceable terrorist sleeper cell in the US spreading a contagious disease, you would likely have their full attention. In some ways this is what's being allowed to happen, even as the US dumps billions into fighting terrorism abroad.
Working to reduce inequality abroad might also help to stop outbreaks like we saw with ebola. I think in the future, people will look back and say "Well of course there was going to be a global pandemic that wiped out X percent of the world population. You can't have a world that is hyper-connected with air travel while simultaneously leaving most of the population in poverty without getting that result."
TB in LA article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/22/tuberculosis-outbre...
Thanks to unions in the film industry there are rules about how many hours a crew can work in a day without the production incurring very expensive overtime penalties. For example, once an actor is on set for 16 hours, they hit what is called "Golden Time" and they are paid their full day rate every hour. There's also a 12 hour turnaround for actors, meaning that if an actor is wrapped at 8pm, they can't be called to set until 8:00am the following day (there is a 10 hour turnaround time for crew).
Film shoots are extremely time-sensitive endeavors. You might only have rented a location for one day, so there is a lot of pressure to shoot everything you need for the movie at that location, no matter how far overtime the production must push their crew. This would quickly get out of control if overtime rules were not stringently enforced.
The result is that every day of a film production is scheduled down to the minute before the day even begins, ideally. Night crews and swing-shifts get scheduled, rather than working a crew for 24 hours straight, again ideally.
My point is that it is possible to do time-sensitive, high-pressure, complicated work without pushing people past their physical limits. It just requires tons of planning and scheduling. However the only way to get an employer to put resources into planning and scheduling is to make sure that there are incentives (or disincentives) for them to behave this way. There must be strict financial penalties that prevent employees at banks from working too many hours. A 29 year-old banker getting a $400,000 bonus is not going to tell his employer that he needs to leave the office by 7pm anymore than an aspiring Hollywood actress is going to tell her director that the crew must stop shooting because it is past her bedtime. In certain industries, where jobs are highly sought after and rewards are large, you cannot depend on workers to regulate themselves.
I really enjoyed this article, however, I think you have glossed over what really led to the 2008 banking crisis. The banks bundled subprime home loans into securities that were then sold off to investors. As I understand it, what actually put the banks at risk was that banks were selling "Credit Default Swaps" (CDSes) on those bundled mortgage assets. These CDSes were essentially unregulated insurance policies that banks sold to insure the bundled mortgages against losses. Since the CDSes were not technically insurance policies (even though they really were) the banks did not have to keep money put away to cover those insurance policy payouts if the mortgage-backed assets went bad. This resulted in the banks selling many more CDSes than they could actually cover. I'm not an economist or banker, but as I understand it, the unregulated CDS market is what really put the banks at risk in 2008. I highly recommend the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis for anyone interested in the 2008 crash.