Starting A New Country

Laying down the law in a benevolent dictatorship

Friend and I had a long conversation about the things the US should do if we run the country. ¹ Most of the good ideas in this post are from him so I can sadly only claim credit for the shitty portions of this post. I figured it was interesting to see how many people agreed on opinions I’d probably never be able to say out loud as a political platform. ²

Here are the rules in this country.

1. Transportation. Build more trains. Build more trains. Build more trains. Turn US into train central. Turn every Boring Tunnel into a train. Skytrain, underground metros, trains in tunnels, idc, just make everything a train. Everywhere should be trainable. Ban street parking. Parking lots only allowed at residential areas. Flights? I might allow it. Spaceships? I will allow it. Everything else should just be a bike, or train. No cars allowed otherwise.

2. Politics. Call politicians out on their shit. You run on this platform? You get voted in based on this platform, smart contract keeps you in the next vote if you do these things you promised, or else you can’t run in the next election. Delete the electoral college. Delete the senate. Delete the SEC. Eliminate the Supreme Court. Keep Congress, but make them run simulations of everything they said if it would happen. Fire everyone except for 10 people in the US government. ³ You say something, people like it, you gotta do it, or else it’s time to go. Make being progressive Unlindy - if you’re a progressive you gotta implement something different (doesn’t matter the change), or else you’re labelled a non-progressive. Every 5 years use the Wu-tang clan name generator to rename parties and generate randomized RGB colours for the party platforms so people can’t guess whether it’s trendy or not to vote for someone. Fire people mid-term. Pay the 10 people who are left in government EXTREMELY well. No more automatic pension funds for gov employees⁴, use it towards universal healthcare.

   

3. Science and Research. Hire 4 Physics PhDs + GPT-3 to spend 10 seconds reading NSF grants. Decide based on the headline. Everyone else gets put in the ‘middle’ or "‘reject pile’. 5% of grants are just randomly funded out of the middle and rejected piles. You are working on hard tech (e.g. making a new battery? You’ve done it before, now you’re making it better? Good, automatically funded.) 2 things we ask for: what have you done in the past, what do you want to do, 1 page max. Nothing else. Give everyone doing science on a visa a visa automatically for a year. Until people get their shit together in psychology we defund them. Eliminate sociology as a field of study. You study something in the social sciences? You have to hunger games it out so unless you’re the top 10 people in the field you have to go learn mechanical engineering. Economics except for game theory is outlawed (which shouldn’t be a problem since we banned everything except equity). We will allow humanities because humanities and arts are cool. Make things look nice.

4. Housing. Just. build. more. housing. Evict people living <3 floor houses in urban areas politely (too bad, here’s some consolation money, we’re building a high-rise building). Force everyone to live in something. You need help or medication? Universal healthcare and specific living spot for you. No one allowed on the streets.

5. Energy. Nuclear power everywhere. Ideally my backyard should have a swimming pool with nuclear lodes. Take the 3 states nobody lives in and just make it into a nuclear powered place with trains. Ban oil. No more oil needed once you build enough trains. No more oil needed if no cars needed. Ban farms as a thing. Ban corn syrup. Move all corn industries into some other industry. The US has too much corn and dairy.

6. Finance. Ban every tradeable asset except equity. Ban debt. Ban RSUs and options. Ban everything except for IPO. You want to sell to another company, they buy all of your equity. You want to short something? Buy negative equities, and pay dividends to shareholders if equity goes up. You lose too much money and can’t afford it you go to jail. Ban credit scores. ⁵ Ban futures, options, Tbonds, mezzanine debt. These are just words people made up to seek rent and make a job for themselves. Ban Roth IRAs and all pensions, and just make people buy their own pensions. Direct funds to other things, like experimental UBI.

7. Healthcare. Universal healthcare. This one is controversial but some things should just be self-paid if they are untreatable. Preventative healthcare. Because we banned corn syrup we reduced one of the leading causes of disease.

8. US Constitution. When they WROTE the US constitution it was supposed to be updated (every 19 years or something broh). So just remove it. You’re telling me Clarence Thomas interprets HALF of a sentence in the constitution as “for states only”, and the other half as “for the country”, and it wasn’t bent for political will but the original will of the founding fathers? Ban guns except for rifles and shotguns, then just put in controls. There are some crimes that are just unpreventable. An assassination? yeah it would have happened anyway. Some crime you have to give up on, when there’s a will there’s a way.

9. Programming. This one is specific but ban all languages and formats except for 3. 1 type of file format (some sort of moving image), 1 type of system-level language (CPP), 1 type of fast prototyping language (Python). All things are protobufs.

10. Secession. If too many people want to secede, we claim California, NY, DC, Utah, and one red state (Texas maybe). Florida should just secede we don’t care. Put nuclear power plants in states people don’t live in.

11. Taxes. The government automatically takes in taxes off-the-top based on income. You can dispute it if you think it’s calculated incorrectly. Why did we build in systematic ways to do tax evasion that only the people who spent time looking at forms are able to do, if we wanted to collect taxes? You just answer one simple question: how much did you make THIS YEAR? We don’t need the SEC and a bunch of other agencies after deleting other equities.

12. Cancel everyone. Everyone is always cancelled by default, all the time. Say what you want to say. Actually do something dumb? Go to jail. Focus on high rehab rate [low conviction idk].
    

I don’t remember some of the late night conversation, but there were a couple more ideas that seem just fairly obvious to the both of us that no one is doing. If it comes to me will add it to this post.

Take the below poll.

1. For context both of us spent a long time in commonwealth countries prior to moving to the US. Much of my political position might lean towards the lower bottom half of the political spectrum.

2. Most of this is in jest because I’m not a serious person 90% of the times but I’d like see a version of the US this is implemented in.

3. The US local gov has grown exponentially in the last couple years. What have we seen in outcomes?

4. 35.49 trillion USD.

5. You’re telling me if I spend WAY MORE money on my credit card and pay it back (basically using my card as a debit card), it’s somehow giving me magical internet and reputation points over saving it?