We have a right to clean air.

Just as 19th century disease was (to oversimplify a tad) erradicated by providing people clean water. And 20th century disease by clean surfaces. The 21st century will be all about clean air.

In offices, public spaces, and especially in public transport, the air is infectious. It doesn't matter if you wear a mask, or disinfect your hands and doorhandles. Modern diseases are adapted to spreading through the air and air-conditioning.

As long as the poor are forced to travel daily in overcrowded buses and trains, the epidemics will continue.

We've seen that lockdowns, hand sanitisers, vaccination, etc, are all only slightly effective against airborn disease.

But some territories have started to take the first steps toward eliminating covid. Small incremental improvements to ventilation. And it will help a bit. But it's worth remembering that it won't be enough - this is a disease of overcrowding, and the only effective cure is to improve living conditions.

There are several possible solutions I've thought of, though others could maybe find better ones:

• Zoning so that houses and workplaces must move closer together.
• High taxes on workplaces near the most overcrowded parts of the transport network.
• More buses and bus lanes of course. If people need to stand, it should be considered overcrowded. The bus/train company should have to pay the standers, as an incentive.
• Limit the rate of entering the metro, to physically prevent overcrowding. People have to queue, or traven at a different time.
• Free travel outside rush hour. Because extra passengers do not cost the provider anyway.
• Reducing the vacancy in inner-city housing, through a UBI-style tax and benefit system.

We need a way to measure the level of democracy of each territory. And especially when it changes, we need a may to measure whether the new law or regime takes us closer or further away.

First, the simplest objections:

• This already exists. There are organisations that measure democracy globally, but what they mostly measure is people's opinions of democracy is their country, which is not at all the same thing. We need an objective, not a subjective measure
• It's hard to define the criteria that define a democracy. There are a few points which are debatable alright. In the end this measure will become the first rigorous definition of democracy. Once that first step is done, anbody can fork this and change some of the criteria to make an improved version
• It's debatable whether all of the things specified here are desirable. Certainly there are many people who don't believe in them, but those people don't believe in a pure democracy. Whether pure democracy is a desirable thing is an important debate. To have that debate, we first want an accurate measure of what is is.

A pure, or 'direct' democracy, does not exist anywhere today. It is a theoretical ideal, like a competitive economy, or a meritocracy, or equality-of-opportunity. But democracy at least is easy to specify: "It is a government which is totally subservient to the population. It acts according to the will of the majority. The actions of the democractic government are the same as would be taken by a well-designed multiple-round referendum."

That was my own definition. There are other definitions, mostly because there are multiple meanings of the word democracy. For some people it is "territories with the word 'democratic' in them, or "places where the government is made of elected representatives", or "places which are free and economically open", or "states which are political allies of my state". Those are vague definitions so they are not much use in objective discussions.

To show what it would look like, I'll build an example section.

1. Are all political offices elected?
2. Are some people above the law, and will remain so for life?
3. Are electoral districts drawn by a body independent from politics?
4. Can residents lose the right to vote, for example by being imprisoned?
5. Can any resident initiate a referendum?
6. Is the constitution mutable only by referendum?
7. Is there a written constitution at all?
8. Is there a mechanism by which all of the people holding power be removed from power before their term ends (except for judges)?
9. Is there a secret ballot?

The number of 'yes' answers is important. But some questions are more important than others. The above questions are a sample of the more important ones near the top. The questions near the bottom will be more like 10. "is there a government" 11. are there elections? 12. is succession chosen by people outside the family of the office holder?

Nearly every territory will get yes answers to q9-11. They more measure whether it is the opposite of democracy. The places that fail will be monarchies or dictatorships etc.

Very few will answer yes to q1-8. Only Switzerland (AFAIK) will pass q5. So with only one state that can pass it, q5 is therefore the most important question.

So it becomes a ranking on two levels. The questions are ranked by importance, according to how many territories can answer yes to them. Then the territories are ranked in order, according to the lowest question it answers no to.

For example the UK is often called a democracy, because it ranks highly in surveys of people's perception of democracy. It has extraordinarily effective propoganda. But objectively it is much less democratic than its neighbours. It fails questions 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9. And 7 and 9 are very weak tests, that indicate a very weak democracy.

So this is a concrete measure, not of people's perception of democracy in their regions, but of real democracy. The word will no longer just be a political throwaway, but have real meaning. This tool will inform our debates and influence policy.

Politicians are (by and large) people who spend a lot of time talking to other politicians, who are sensitive to other people's expectations, who go with the flow and follow conventional wisdom. They don't break ranks and do anything radical or innovative alone.

The politician who does otherwise is an unsuccessful politician.

When a government makes a plan to solve some problem, it tends to be the same as his neighbour's solution.

China was the first territory to react to Covid, and it reacted brutally, with what we now call lock-downs. Total suppression of human movement and interaction and activity, covering an entire city.

This was not the only option nor the most effective one, though the people who copied this solution now claim that it was.

And that's just it, most of the world copied this approach, because politicians instinctively copy each other.

But if covid had started somewhere else, if the first government to react had been portuguese or venezualan or dutch, the template solution would certainly have been very different. It would have been a less brutal and more effective one. The world might be a very different place today.

I've previously said here that mass vaccination is a crucial tool in disease control, but that enforced vaccination has some problems. The first five I'm just listing, because I think everyone should be aware of them. I know some are controversial, but I'm not planning to discuss them here. The last one is IMO the most interesting.

Misc issues, not the subject of this post

• civil rights - forcing medical treatment on people is normally a serious crime, but for whatever reason people seem to make an exception for vaccination.

• utility - politicians usually don't think so, but people generally make better decisions for themselves than politicians will make for them

• fragility - when everybody is forced to do the same thing at the same time, and problems with it are immediately big problems. Like when the CDC mandated one covid test kit, but the kit was defective, and hospitals were prohibited from using different non-approved kits. It's better for people to have access to several options, in case the mandated one has some flaw.

• incentivisation (1) - a government which cannot enforce a rule has to convince people to follow the rule. So it has an incentive to make high quality rules. You can then measure whether the rule really works for people by measuring the compliance by demographic.

• incentivitation (2) - many people will resist or ignore a command from an authority. They are much more likely to obey good convincing advice from an authority.

The real subject of this post

• trolley problem

You can guess that a novel vaccine will have unexpected side effects and will kill some number of people. You should, because every medical intervention has a non-zero mortality rate, with very rare exceptions like acupuncture.

So the vaccine will save X deaths and cause Y deaths. Nobody can know what X and Y are, except that X is much bigger than Y. This sounds like the trolley problem.

I used to think that providing access to vaccines is good. People can make their own decisions to take the risk, based on their personal risk profiles and doctor's advice. But if the president or minister forces people to do something that kills Y people, the president/minister is responsible for those deaths. The only question would be what level of culpability he would have.

So my question.

Does instead framing it as a trolley problem hold water? If so, does that debunk the criminal argument? Or is there maybe a hybrid perspective or a different one, that's even more solid?

For email, IMAP has existed for ages. It allows you to see multiple email inboxes in one place (among other things). This is great.

But there is an even stronger need for this functionality with calendars. I want to be able to see my work calendar, personal calendar, and those of certain friends/family, all in one view. Basically the ability to synchronise multiple online accounts/databases with one application. Just like IMAP.

Why doesn't it exist?

I've heard of caldav. But either it doesn't work, it is not meant to do that, nobody supports it properly, or else I just couldn't figure it out.

A working version of this is a big thing the world needs.

Firstly, do yous agree that this is true?

I find it a very general rule, in Europe anyway, the poorer the area the better the food.

And if so, why?

My theory is that it relates to industrialisation. Developed countries, they are developed because their cultures are focused on efficiency. They are endlessly searching for ways to do things more cheaply.

So you find farms, distributers, shops and restaurants, all trying to minimise their costs quite aggressively. They are not interested in quality. They have no pride in their work.

Poor countries are poor because the focus too much on quality and not enough on finding the cheapest possible way to do things.

Does this explanation extend to other cultural elements apart from food?

This video prompted me to write down these proposals.

In my experience, there are three reasons housing in cities is becoming unaffordable.

Houses are bought up by a few large investment banks, and left empty. This creates a housing shortage, which inflates prices.

Yes this is not one statement, there are three things here:

• vacancy

• multiple ownership

• ownership by non-people

The first one is the most important.

Vacancy

This can be solved by adding a large property tax on all housing, a flat rate on each housing unit. Then (option 1) every adult recieves a UBI of the same amount as the property tax, (option 2) Every adult can apply for an exemption from the tax, (option 3) some variation.

Landlords are allowed to pass the charge on to their tenants. If you want to encourage home-ownership, you only allow them to pass a portion on, and many landlords will sell to home-owners.

What about businesses who have a legitimate need to own property and leave it vacant? They have to pay the charge or sell, or gift the property to the state.

Option 1 has the side effect that the homeless, people flat-sharing, adults living with parents; they suddenly have a lot of extra income.

Option 2 has several side effects too.

So option 3 is a tweaked version that suits whatever the government's policies are today. The point of this policy is that it's simple and robust. The data comes from registries which already have good quality data. It would be very hard to avoid the payment, or financially ruin anybody. Please don't overcomplicate it too much with excemptions and caveats.

It's possible to design a menu. Should couples be entitled to two houses? Should large families benefit more? Should people who don't live in the same country be discouraged from owning property there? You decide your policy, and you can make a version of this that increases housing occupancy, but also fits the rest of your politics.

Multiple ownership

People who own many properties, whose main income is from rent-collection. They are parasitic and shouldn't really exist. So you add to the above, a limitation that you can only pass on the tax on a certain number of properties. For the others you must pay the charge. In option 1 your tenants keep their UBI, so they could pay you illegally. In option 2, not.

Another thing that would help is a tax as a percentage of rental income. The tax won't just be passed on as rental increase because rental prices as set be the demand side. At some point the rental income less tax is less than maintenance costs, so there is an incentive to sell to a home owner.

Ownership by non-people

These entities could be vulture funds, or universities or hospitals or housing co-ops. So it's important that the measure is proportionate.

It is another tax. A small one, and not a flat rate but linked to the market. Something like 1% of the property value. So for a property worth 500,000, that's 400 per month. So if the rent is 2000 per month, the business makes 20% less than a human landlord would. If the aim is to make money from rent, this should be enough to make it uncompetitive. There will be an incentive to sell.

For a business which has a legitimate need to own housing, this should not be a huge strain or their budgets. 1% tax on an investment is not a lot. You could also lower business tax slightly to compensate.

Part 2 - House prices and rental prices

The way to control house and rental prices is already slightly well known. But I'll summarise it here because it's related and important. The above is about disincentivising predatory practices, which is important, but it's not enough to control house prices. Regulation needed to do that.

In a market with (nearly) fixed supply, prices are set by the demand side, not the supply side. Building more houses is a good thing, but it only slightly lowers house prices. The main thing determining housing prices is how much people can afford to pay, so this is what you manipulate.

You evenly reduce the amount everybody can afford to pay for houses. Then sellers must reduce prices by the same amount, or else they just won't get sold. The trick is to preserve the relative wealth of buyers - if man A can afford to pay more than man B, man A will be able to buy the bigger house in the available stock. Trick is to reduce the amount everybody is willing ot pay evenly, without changing that.

1. Make mortgages a limited length, eg 15 years. This limits how much people can borrow.

2. Forbid mortgage monthly payments (and rents) above a maximum ratio of the buyer's (or renter's) salary. (This is commonly done, but without also implementing point 1, it just creates longer mortgages and doesn't reduce prices.)

part 3 - location

In city centres, housing is too expensive. This is because there is a concentration of workplaces and a shortage of housing. The solution is to redress the balance.

• Prohibit building more workplaces in areas with housing shortage ... unless the developer builds 2x the number of housing units as workplaces.

• Prohibit building housing in areas without enough local workplaces. They also need local parks, shops, pubs, schools etc, or else the developer will be forced to provide these amenities.

• Rules to prevent declaring one use to the planners, then changing the use after the building is finished.

Developers will thus be forces to build new towns with mixed use, instead of housing estates far from workplaces.

This gradually solves the high-rents-in-cities problem, the dead city centres, overcrowded public transport, long commutes, removes many drivers that make life miserable for everybody.