chr1

Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.

The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.

And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.

If quantum computers turn out to be able to do that, the api would be very similar to what dwave has today.

That is one will use normal computer to reformulate the task into a predefined form, submit that to quantum computer, and then use normal computer again to process the results.

It can't become mainstream, it is a very narrowly specialized hardware for a very limited set of tasks.

In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.

If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.

There is effectively infinite space up high, and low is bounded by death, so it never can average out.

Parents don't have any choice in this either.

That's a very fucked up thing to say, governments or random strangers from internet do not have a right to decide how parent raises his child. Do you even have a child?

I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds

It was just my own experience, if you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.

And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?

Being in school does not make one educated. Keeping disruptive child in the same room with normal children, means we get fewer educated people, not more.

For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_service. 12 year old would be pretty fine to spend 4-5 hours a day cleaning streets for a while.

Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.

I went to school at 6 years, our schools were for 10 years, and at 16 i went to university. At the university with us were some 20 year olds, who went to school at 7 years, were not able to get to university in their 17, were drafted to army at 18 and came back. 20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.

20 year old who wants to study is not going to cause any problem for the public school either, it will even be beneficial for the class as children will see that studying is useful.

teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons

When they are not allowed to make choices, the parents are supposed to make choices for them, not corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Laws like "do not kill", "do not steal", have been found long before politicians existed, by the natural selection of societies. That is groups of people who did not follow these laws were largely outcompeted by those who followed.

If you decide to break the law of "do not steal" in large extent you get millions dead like it have happened in communist Russia or Maoist China. If you break it in smaller extent (e.g. by very high tax) you get stagnant economy like in EU.

In contrast to that, the laws banning children to work were adopted at the point when children did not need to work, so they are largely irrelevant. If these laws existed in 18th century London or Paris they would cause many deaths too, since there was no other way to feed these children.

So not all laws are given by politicians.

Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later

Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public school, so there is no financial incentive.

15 year olds forced to sit in classes they don't want are way more miserable than those allowed to work and feel like adults. In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.

the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids

That's a great solution too, and must be available option for parents. Sadly very few schools do that, making both unruly kids and good kids miserable as a result.

schools should be given the resources

I don't think the problem is the lack of resources, specialist for helping unruly kids is not going to cost more than a math teacher. The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study. As a result they have a system that harms everyone involved.

You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?

I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.

most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.

That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.

Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.

child has to be in education until they turn 18.

employing 15 year olds is [not] legal

These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.

Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.

Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.

15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.

Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.

When we lived in tribes, people knew who did what job, and those who were taking more than they were contributing were punished harshly.

Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.

Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.

Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.

That extra 200 will also allow some people to move to a rural area, decreasing demand, which means you won't find a renter.

Well it kinda is the same, in any transaction today two people vote to transfer goods and the rest of the people in the country vote to take a percentage of that as tax.

We only need to make sure that decisions affect the smallest number of people possible and only those who make decision bear its good or bad consequences.

Same can work with other issues, like do we want to build a road or stadium, how do we want to deal with homeless in our part of the city etc.

Online, open voting, with possibility to trade votes, and requirement to reach almost 100% accept vote for decisions, can work much better than systems we have now.

As for average person being not smart, average buyer poorly understands biology, and ends up buying things that are harmful to eat or eats to much, but we do not have representative doctors who will decide who eats how much in restaurants. The important thing is to create an arrangement where poor choices of a person do not affect others.

That is the same argument proponents of planned economy use. It doesn't work in reality because no one knows what other people need and no one cares. Representatives care about being reelected, but they have a very hard time figuring out what people want of them because vote ones in 4 years, or angry people on social media is too unreliable channel of communication.

More direct voting allows representatives to better represent people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy so it is a part of the first issue too.

Well if you knew a good reason for secret ballots you could tell us that, instead of telling that you are smarter than me. You really should take another look at hn commenting guidelines, it is useful outside of hn too https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a very good question, for instance for most of its republican period Rome did not have secret ballot, and voting was open. That have changed in 138BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_laws_of_the_Roman_Repub... and have caused major instability, political violence and eventually demise of the republic.

The issue was that the poor people could vote for Gracchi brothers, but were too afraid to protect them, and one without the other only have brought to a worse outcome where they could not vote at all.

Even today if you are afraid of saying openly what policies or which politician you support, how can you hope to enact these policies?

Secret ballot started being introduced in US starting from 1888 and it did not bring any of positive changes that its supporters thought that it would.

In places where a group can intimidate majority of voters and force to vote one way, secret ballot does not help at all because that group can also fake the results. It even makes situation worse, by hiding the actual data from opposition.

Why is it a bad idea? Can you describe one bad consequence of it, if it is implemented in combination with the other ideas above?

I hope you will agree that the overall goal is maximizing freedom and autonomy, that is allowing every person or group to pursue happiness the way they want make mistakes or good choices and bear the consequences.

The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.

Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.

No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.

What we have now is a politician saying vote for me and i'll pass laws that will give you 10k in next 4 years, people vote for the politician who then takes money from scamazon gives 10 to voters and takes 10mln to get elected again.

Eliminating the middleman makes things better already.

But more importantly with vesting time, large number of votes, ease of reversing a decision in a new vote, take $10 and vote for something that costs you more simply won't work.

Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.

Can you bring one example where the public wanted to treat a group unjustly and parliament elected by that same public have defended the group?

If majority of people in a country want to persecute an outnumbered subgroup, then what prevents the majority of delegates wanting the same as well?

You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.

But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.

Why do you think that similar law could not be passed without direct vote? The problem is not direct democracy but the fact that it is being done in a wrong way.

Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.

If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).

This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.

The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.

The main factor reducing gulf stream is increase of fresh water runoff into Arctic ocean. So maybe we should invest into building Sibaral Canal diverting some of the water of northern rivers towards Aral sea, and by that saving both Nordic and Central Asian countries.

Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.

If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.

People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.

From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.

So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.

Russians also had the money until government did not start to take away that from people who had lot of it. When government can confiscate all of the money of a rich person, only those on the side of government will remain rich.

Historically most people used to spend for children and grandchildren significantly more that on themselves. The current situation when people go to other countries and then say we do not have money for more than one child is abnormal, and can't go on very long.

I agree that there are many better ways to organize social programs, e.g. replace all of them with negative tax, when some percentage of all tax collected past year is divided equally between all citizens of any age.

Sure well organized society is very impressive, e.g. invention of capitalism and private ownership is the greatest invention ever made, but the point i was trying to make is that it is only a foundation for really exciting stuff like science spaceships, immortality.

Well, US spends 1.5 trillion on social security and only 20 billion on NASA, so "present" is kind of overrepresented. Redirecting that little bit so that a few more people can live without working, or can get expensive treatment to live a few more years is stupid, not inspiring.