Probably impossible, but create a slush fund where companies that behave badly are forced to pay into so we can do things like fix roads and build housing.
We could instead randomly select representatives instead of using popularity contests where the candidates need money for advertisements in order to get popular, or to just even let people know that they exist.[1]
The idea of fines as a revenue stream has never sat well with me. Fines are meant to be a disincentive. The ideal collection amount is zero. Treating them as a revenue stream creates a perverse incentive to enforce the penalty without disincentivizing the behavior.
This is literally what happened in Belgium when politicians did budget. A piece of the expected slice was traffic fines.
So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.
If I drive carelessly and get a meaningful fine, I'll think twice next time, irrespective of who gets the money. I only care that I am fined. Unless the police starts to administer fines when they shouldn't, all is good, right? What happened in Belgium?
I don’t know about Belgium specifically, but one of the usual issues is that it incentivises aggressive policing of minor issues that make money (like parking violations), which takes resources out of other problems (like mugging).
In some situations (cough random towns with sections of highway running through them in Texas), it incentivizes an approach to traffic enforcement which is barely distinguishable from getting mugged.
That's fine for you personally, and it may sound all good from a logical, theoretical, or academic perspective, however I personally know of people who have lost their license due to multiple fines and "demerit points" (NZ) resulting in that consequence.
The fines, and loss of license hurt them personally, professionally, and financially, but didn't change their behavior outside of the very short term.
In NZ we have people that are in and out of prison due to burglaries, robberies, etc... but the penalties don't change their longer term behavior.
There's a deeper problem, and penalties are important, but not the entire fix.
The occasional fine I get (and the prospect of getting another) does affect my driving habits and attentiveness, and it's the same for people close to me. Can't talk for others, though I'd expect this to be the norm.
Then these people _obviously_ are not fit to drive a multi-ton killing machine at all and should have their license permanently revoked, when they had multiple chances for introspection.
Driving carefully is not a boolean. It's possible to design roads/environments (accidentally or not) in such a way that the “you drove carelessly” metric that triggers the fine statistically applies more often.
Not really. If you hit a person with your car and that person becomes disabled. It will be way more expensive for the govt in the long run compared to a few fines.
Just like police departments use asset forfeiture to get money to buy their “toys” while innocent people lose their cash and cars because carrying cash is suspicious.
I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure.
A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences.
If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(
If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.
> The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense.
I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed.
So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement.
Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.
I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.
Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.
That says a whole lot all by itself. You acknowledge that reform doesn’t work? There is always money to be made because people don’t like the set of rules set? So when people follow all those rules, make new rules that people will break to keep it going? Where does it stop?
Governments should not operate fiscally like corporations. A financial institution will budget around fees because it's in their benefit for their customers to incur fees. A government should not budget around fines because they want the behavior which was fined to not occur at all.
I think one way to prevent bad incentives is to ensure that the organizational units that create and enforce policies are not the ones that benefit from any fines collected.
Maybe a uniform tax credit/refund for each citizen that is covered by that level of government. We the citizens can then decide if we fix the issue or continue to generate fines, but at least the budget isn't expecting revenue that could disappear (like the lack of traffic tickets during the beginning of COVID).
How about fines go into a sovereign wealth fund (but not be seen as major source for the fund- more a bonus) so there is no short term budget planning based on fine revenue.
It’s a form of regulation. We could also put the sysadmin and the CIO to death every time there is a data breach but we, as a society, have decided that is too extreme. We could also choose to simply wag our fingers and hope the shame they feel will prevent a repeat. Fines seem to strike a balance.
That sounds like a great slogan, but you really don't want a justice system that's has an additional mandate to collect revenue. It's basically civil forfeiture all over again
> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.
Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.
Your article gives North Korea a fertility rate of 1.78, which is substantially higher than even the US at 1.62. South Korea is an entirely different world at 0.75. So you're looking at a population change per 20 years of -11% in North Korea, -19% in the US, and -62% in South Korea!! None of these are good of course, but the timeline of decline and collapse are quite different. All numbers from here, which is just a cleaner representation of UN numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/
In the end I think the future will become much like the past in that fertility is essentially the point of a nation. What is a few generations of fading prosperity when the longterm cost is the very survival of said civilization? It's just a nonsense deal that nobody would ever agree to on a macro scale, but that most of all Western civilization is trending towards.
> make large percentages of a student's grade come from in person tests
One possible solution is to remove technology but then you’ll need to detect smart glasses and other hidden devices. Another possible solution is to expect the use of AI and design assessments that are so hard that you have to work in tandem with AI otherwise you can’t get a good grade.
You cannot make it impossible to cheat, you can only make it hard. For example with your suggestion the student could use the old standby of paying experts for help.
The nice thing about monitored testing is that it makes cheating hard, and if you catch somebody there's usually incontrovertible proof.
We're considering this. Tho we want to do an interview with AI to see how they use modern tools, then the rest onsite to avoid many forms of "cheaters".
I guess it comes down to industry. We're on hn so emphasis is on technical ability and in that context what you say is true. I'm in a space that requires trustworthiness is part of the core value proposition so there is little acceptance of outsiders and much emphasis on back channel checks that the candidate is solid. NK fake candidate etc is just not a thing in that context
> In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".
This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.
Yup I'm gonna second this one. I grew up in Cologne and Christians here generally don't think the Cologne Cathedral [1] (which holds among other things, according to the Church the bones of the three magi) is "just a building" and if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church
If you wanted to turn the cathedral of cologne into a mall you’d get a pretty strong reaction from _me_, who’s neither religious nor has ever been to Cologne!
same -- maybe you should look into the Quakers, they're basically a denomination that is only community and sans doctrine, is my understanding. I only haven't followed this advice for bad reasons
The Church building is only considered Holy when Christ is considered present for Eucharist. Should it be removed along with the Altar, it only becomes a building, to Catholics at least. This is why abandon Churches can be converted to other things, in Montreal there are examples of these buildings.
OP is correct here by saying that the Church is the people. It’s just that the word has two meanings, the church building and the Church of Christ.
It’s also why sometimes you hear Christians say things like “your family is also your Church”
According to canon law, a Catholic church must be desacralized (or deconsecrated) in order to be licitly used for other, though not just any, purposes[0].
Your interpretation of "people and not the building" is pretty unique to Protestantism in the Christian belief, and arguably the central tenet of Methodism. It is absent in much of the history of Christian (and most other monotheistic) beliefs.
I recommend you look at (as an example), what the Catholic Church did since around the conversion of the Romans through to Vatican II. Even when I was a kid (some decades after Vatican II), attending Catholic school and regularly attending mass, the Catholic Church building was considered an incredibly special place by the congregations.
In my school, the chapel (which held a tabernacle), was once used by some well-meaning but incredibly ill-educated pupils to hold a palm reading booth for a school fete fundraiser. When the more traditional Catholics in the faculty found out, they burst in, soaking the pupils and chapel with holy water and latin prayer (first time used in the school since Vatican II! Showed their colours that day!), claiming that to engage in the occult near a tabernacle was an incredibly offensive thing to do, because the space held a tabernacle, end of.
The whole thing about Protestantism is to remove mystery. Research the early history from Luther through the English Tudors and the King James Bible, all the way through to the Mayflower and the reason why they were fleeing Europe to the New World, and you'll see that big and plain. It doesn't mean that a sense of mystery in terms of rituals and rites held in special designated spaces died and went away though, it just means it's less present than it once was.
For many, many people (billions on Earth today), "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not. And this is not limited to Christianity either.
As this was a Methodist Church, I suspect most people who used it would consider it "just a building", albeit one with sentimental memories (weddings, funerals, weekly worship), but sure, it's bricks and mortar and balconies and pews and a broken organ. shrug.
It's just that's actually quite an unusual viewpoint on a global scale, for most denominations.
Catholics abandon and sell church buildings all the time. Once you've removed a small handful of sacred items and done the de-consecration-ritual, it is "just a building" to them too.
There are vast numbers of repurposed churches in Catholic countries. Just walk the streets in an Italian city.
I'm not familiar with the specifics for catholics, but it is conceptually not too different from how protestants do it.
With the caveat, best repeated in every post under this article, that of course very strong sentimental feelings can be attached to a church building. You could put a religious dimension on the morality of hurting peoples feelings by destroying or changing a beautiful thing I guess. But, it is not the house itself that is holy in a holy house.
The piece you're missing is de-consecration. A consecrated space is holy whether the people are in it or not, within the Catholic tradition. Yes, you can deconsecrate it, and then it's just a building. However a loaded tabernacle makes it a holy space in the eyes of Catholics even if it's an empty space. It is conceptually very different to Methodism: the entire point of Methodism is to abandon such mysteries.
I'm eastern orthodox so not part of one of the groups you're talking about but we share a lot with catholics so maybe close enough.
The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle? I mean I doubt they would have been pleased about this without it but lay catholics I know take the tabernacle extremely seriously.
I don't particularly, aesthetically, like to see churches used for secular purposes but if they've been properly desacralized I don't have any strong religious objections.
> "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not
This is true but it implies a causality that is backwards I think. Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years. If they stop doing that the church doesn't immediately "lose its holiness" or whatever but it does change: it becomes a shrine or a relic or maybe just a building.
> The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle?
Yes, I think the tabernacle was the crux of the issue here.
> Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years.
That's a more modern, and dare I say, Methodist view of the church. If a space has a tabernacle in it with the body of Christ in it, within the Catholic tradition, that space is holy and consecrated even when there isn't a human soul in the place, because by definition there is a belief that the soul of Christ is in that space.
You can deconsecrate that space and remove that blessed sacrament and then it's just a building, but in the eyes of most Catholics the space itself has a mystery even in the absence of worshipping congregations.
Like I said I'm orthodox and have never been much exposed to protestant theology other than it just being sort of in the air in western secular culture.
I think you'd get interesting answers if you polled lay catholics with a question like "which is more holy, a consecrated but never-used church, or a parish recently desacralized after centuries of regular use."
There's definitely one "correct" answer if you asked a bishop or a catholic theologian. But I have noticed that there is often a big difference between lay religious experience and hierarchically controlled official dogma. A poll a few years ago had less than half of american catholics believing in transubstantiation, for example.
You're kind of proving the point. The building is not the real thing, as any sense in which it is holy (which is a word that means set apart for a special purpose) can be readily undone. The church doesn't cease to exist when that happens. It moves. The same way the Tabernacle (the ancient Tabernacle) moved, which happened on a semi-regular basis. The place is less important than who is there.
It seems like this is confusing The Church with a church.
Notre Dame Cathedral is a church, but you could burn it to the ground tomorrow and it wouldn’t have hardly any impact at all on the persistence of The Church.
Such is claimed, but I suspect that this is a misleading truth. Christianity is an extremely successful religion, but if it were less popular and Notre Dame was one of only a few church buildings (even, just one of a few with that level of grandeur), then burning it to the ground would indeed have a profound impact on the persistence of The Church. For those religions with a single temple, the destruction of that building is more than merely traumatic, it is catastrophic. Christianity only avoids this by having so very many buildings, many of them as spectacular as Notre Dame.
> I think it’s Eurocentric to imply that China is morally inferior to the US.
Apart from the genocide of the Uighur, the brutal oppression of Tibet, the complete lack of even the pretense of democratic rights, the total lack of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and on and on. Last I checked not wanting your ethnicity eliminated or brutally repressed isn’t just a European thing.
This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
> This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
I can assure you the reaction at hand is not limited to those you suggest.
I know because I faced my own mortality, if only for a brief moment of time, far earlier than I ever expected and earlier than most would prefer I think. And when I did, this exact realisation hit me like a freight train. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more profound, visceral moment.
What also may have helped, is developing quite a deep and close relationship with an individual who would later go on to pass from cystic fibrosis.
Now one of this is to say I may not now have an entirely different reaction when again it comes time for my card to be punched. However I feel like this has been somewhat tested by the SCI that would follow five years later. It's also not to say that what I felt had been a waste vs what is important will be applicable to all of us, in fact I am sure that realistically, it will be deeply different, personal and particular to each of us as individuals.
When I have particularly bad days as a result of my unlucky medical outcomes, I remind myself of what I experienced that night, and how lucky I was ultimately to be able to experience something like that, and then actually have somewhat of a "second chance" at taking a look down the second fork in the road.
TL;DR
I give 100x times less of a shit about a "career/being productive/min-maxing" than I once did. Your mileage may vary.
I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
In those few weeks my main regrets were a) not having done many of the things on my bucket list, and b) not having children or not going to be live long enough to see them grow up.
I'm someone with recurring nightmare about career goals and such. However at that time, work only crossed my mind briefly and was easily dismissed.
> I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
This is similar to my situation, except I was told, “We’re 99.9% sure it’s not cancer, so relax bro, don’t even worry about it.” Apparently, my age made it incredibly unlikely. “We’d be far more concerned if you were an older gentleman.”
Imagine my surprise when I got called back and they told me the complete opposite.
It worked out in the end as apparently they caught it so early that it had only just turned into cancer. If they had found it even weeks or months earlier, it would not have been cancer yet, just precancerous apparently. This claim seems dubious to me, I mean, how do you tell that? However, I am not a doctor, so what do I know. I do worry sometimes though that perhaps they overstated it and blew up my life over nothing.
I was told to consider myself lucky it was caught when it was as apparently it almost never happens. Again, a claim...that I don't know is accurate, or just something they told me to get me to relax.
You also might think that after something like that, that if something else occurred with my body, people might pay me more heed when I raised it? Well, you would be mistaken. Because I walked right into a goddamn spinal cord injury (incomplete at least, you gotta take the small wins) because they did exactly the same thing again. "Its just stress, probably working too hard, just dont think about it."
Turns out no amount of relaxing is going to walk back severe central canal stenosis resulting in severe cervical myelopathy with significant spinal cord signal change.
That’s the conventional wisdom but I think it’s worth challenging it. Or at least, if by “productivity” you mean “work” (I think there’s an important distinction there).
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
>Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness.
There are plenty of people who don't work such as children, students, carers and retirees. They find meaning in all sorts of activities outside of work.
Most people on their deathbed who would counsel you would counsel you to focus on relationships. The ones who had the insight "people can fuck right off, that's the key to it all" aren't interested in telling us about it.
> the mines are going to be in China anyway, right
If you had read the article you’d know they have their own mine:
“Hardly any firms, even in China, do what MP is attempting: produce finished magnets starting with ore that the company mines itself”
Mostly China doesn’t mine materials but has concentrated the refining capacity in China for many commodities. Thankfully, we do have backup capacity so we won’t be totally screwed if China cuts us off, and the refining technology is well understood and in a conflict we or our allies can cut them off from many raw materials so their refining advantage isn’t a checkmate.
> Mostly China doesn’t mine materials but has concentrated the refining capacity
Unless I'm working on old information, this is not correct. The overwhelming majority of neodymium mining capacity is currently in China.
> you’d know they have their own mine:
Sure, but to make a difference from a geopolitical perspective, we need more than that. And I don't see those kind of mines being opened on a large scale anywhere in the west. Regulations are challenging and environmental resistance is significant.
I wish I could easily donate my tiny settlements to a good cause. It might make it worth the time to register for the class.