Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:

It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!

The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.

1. Creating proposals
2. Proposing amendments
3. Up or down votes

I know some people who are working on a constitution. If you let everyone go all over phase 1, the process will never end. But if you let the minority control the whole process, well, then, you have an oligarchy. And we’ve learned that lesson already.

However, what if you compromise? If you let everyone in on phase 3, but not the others, then you get at least some approval, but you moderate the populism and the paralysis.

Parliamentary procedure is underrated. When we hear about direct democracy, the pundits don’t usually separate out these parts. But there’s good reason to dissect the procedure when talking about democracy. It’s common sense not to be all or nothing.

Summary as the standard view (sentence-long synopsis); points can be added, admins can refactor, users can merge/vote on best version/edit points.

How do we decide which points are central theses? Merging/separations

[Originally recorded a long long time ago]

Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder

The

most interesting thing I discovered about it though, was not the article’s basic conceit

- that Americans are being subdivided into different cultures, but how it was discussed. Naturally on Slashdot, Reddit, MetaFilter, and others, you have certain standards of discussion. I generally find Reddit to be the most politically confrontational.

You could

argue

that it’s the community–

the people in it

that decide whether a website will be a meeting of parliament or a Hello Kitty fan club. But I think there are other things to look at.

Interestingly:

I was also recently looking at a Yahoo! blog on patterns for designing a reputation system. Basically, a pattern is a recognizable formula that a lot of sites use. For example, both Digg and Reddit use a “points” system. Users can award each other points when they like each other’s posts.

The most interesting thing,

however,

was taking Yahoo!’s reputation systems and using them to

reverse engineer sites like Reddit,

Digg, Slashdot, etc. and see the results.

From http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=points:

(Emphasis Theirs.)

Problem Summary

In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

EXAMPLE:

Use When

Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).

Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

The competition isn’t just because the people on Site X

are jerks

• political extremists
• or sexually frustrated

The design of the site is built to promote competition.

Yasuo Fukuda, assumed office 9/07: 25% – 40%

Gordon Brown, assumed office 7/07: 25%

George W. Bush, elected 9/04: 28%

Kevin Rudd, elected 12/07: 56%

Silvio Berlusconi, elected 5/08: 59%

Vladimir Putin, currently not PM: ~75%

(Note that Putin isn’t the prime minister now. But, oddly enough, people still treat him like he’s in power. I wonder why?)

[1], [2]

Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

The United Nations, wanting to rid a country of malaria, tries an experiment. Instead of drafting a plan, it sets sells a billion one dollar contracts. Each contract pays out more than one dollar over its term, if and only if malaria is kept to a certain level or lower during that term.

Rather than discuss the problems this plan might have (with finance, governance, etc.), I’ll let you use your imagination to figure out how the free market might find ways around those issues. (This might go on the show.)

First of all, when the Fed prints money, it does make itself richer at the expense of people who hold the currency. That’s called seigniorage, if you’d like a cocktail party word for it, and it results in inflation. A gold standard replaces this fiat money with money that is backed by a certain weight in gold. Because this weight is constant, it eliminates inflation. However, this can have undesirable side effects, and there are very good arguments against reinstating a gold standard.

In a gold standard, the supply of currency is dependent on gold mining, meaning the supply is not controlled. This can result in a currency shortage, deflation, which makes it worthwhile to hoard currency. Milton Friedman argued that this overrestriction of currency was part of the cause of the Great Depression; Ben Bernanke, the current Fed chair, wrote his thesis on that.

The Fed is an strange institution, run by economic technocrats that are insulated from government influence. This makes them seem both shadowy and unaccountable; however, this intentionally insulates them from the rest of government, where election cycles drive a desire to pump money into the economy. (It’s quite an ideological irony that the modern free market economy is dependent on the good intentions of a few economic professors.) Greenspan, the former Fed chair, was known for being nostalgic for the gold standard:

Greenspan famously argued the case for returning to a gold standard in his 1966 paper “Gold and Economic Freedom“, in which he described supporters of fiat currencies as “welfare statists” hell-bent on using monetary printing presses to finance deficit spending. He has argued that the fiat money system of today has retained the favorable properties of the gold standard because central bankers have pursued monetary policy as if a gold standard were still in place.

A fiat currency is far more flexible than a gold backed one in dealing with cyclical recessions (which did, by the way, occur when the gold standard existed as well). Anyone who argues that the Fed can’t hold down currency is not familiar with Fed history; anyone who thinks the a more accountable government institution would necessarily do any better should be careful.

—

Second of all, if you love the gold standard and Fed-free currency so much, is it best to go through the government? Private currencies do in fact exist, though their legal status is questionable–perhaps something should be done about that. An official gold standard still involves trusting the feds not to abuse it, as they have done in the past. The fact is, governments always abuse, or are prone to abuse, currency, gold and otherwise; if you really want to avoid this sort of inflationary pressure, then it is necessary to make a responsible government institution, use a non governmental currency, or use a mechanical currency.

—-

The Fed depends on the ability of economists to manage the money supply in a prudent manner; inflation, when it comes, is an indication (though not necessarily proof) of irresponsibility. There are plenty of objections to such a system, as political as they are economic. But the solutions will not come from tying our money supply to the vagaries of mining a metal that comes out of the ground, or pretending government isn’t run by human beings.

If your government doesn’t have monetary-policy credibility, attempting to establish that credibility by going on the Gold Standard is a recipe for disaster. If your government does have monetary-policy credibility, going on the Gold Standard doesn’t gain you anything…