TotallyHuman

Right-wingers are more likely to beat you up. Changes the calculus for photographers.

In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There's no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have "reputation" scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone's lying.

The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.

Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn't take a cut.

This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they're bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner's identity is revealed only if they're being sued -- I'm not a lawyer and you'd have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren't skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they're taking for server fees).

We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you're willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you're okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don't know how to set that system up.

Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we'd need some sort of framework to prevent that.

The staffer has two jobs. Their first job is to send a useless mollifying email. Their second job is to make a tally mark next to the words "PORN AGE GATE -- OPPOSED". (Or these days, probably they click a button on a spreadsheet.)

Writing your MP is like voting. It's useless individually, but in aggregate it will change their behaviour.

Hmm... As to the second point, I'd argue that people with dependants are contributing, by having dependants. Giving them a tax break is sort of like paying them to take care of things that the state would have to take care of otherwise, in the form of orphanages, daycares, food banks, public nursing homes, etc. At that point, it's just an efficiency question: is it better to tax parents less (so they have to work fewer hours and can take care of their kids), or is it better to run more after-school programs (so the parents can work while someone else takes care of their kids)? Should we tax them less so they can buy food and shelter, or just give them food and shelter? The answer isn't cleanly one or the other, but falls somewhere between "give them money (by taxing less)" and "give them stuff" for each thing that people provide for their dependants.

As for overpopulation, once people are already born, it's too late. Incentives should prevent people from being born in the first place, but not punish the parents of the already-born (and the already-born themselves). To do that you could do normal birth-rate-reducing things like comprehensive sex ed and ensuring easy access to birth control, or go at it from the other side: streamline the adoption process and incentivize people to adopt rather than procreate.

Why do you think people with dependants should be taxed more heavily? Is it an overpopulation thing?

Who let the SCP authors write headlines?

The strategy that avoids the entire system being dismantled. Imagine if there were five congressional representatives from a new Social Democracy Party. Because those five representatives are the deciding vote if it goes along party lines, they can apply pressure on the Democrats to pass healthcare reform. Hooray, everyone loves the Social Democracy Party.

They might take a few more seats from the Democrats' safe districts in the next election. But in a contentious district where the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning, if half the people who voted Democrat vote Social instead, the vote gets split and the Republican gets in. So many of those people, who want to vote Social, will realize that if they do, then healthcare gets completely gutted. So they hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.

We started deploying malaria vaccines!

Can't the Speaker shut that shit down? Especially since he's admitted exactly what he plans to do?

Mallory Chipman is wonderful.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.