16 Recommendations:

 

1  Respect truth

2  Revere justice

3  Relieve suffering (famine, disease, injury, loneliness)

4  Restrain primal urges (greed, fear, tribalism, procreation)

5  Resist mischief (it's usually regretted)

6  Regard beauty

7  Remain curious

8  Restore balance

9  Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Repair, Recycle stuff

10  Reject social media

11  Repeat the golden rule

12  Stay inventive

13  Save nature

14  Share burdens and benefits

15  Seek meaning

16  Sing sentimental songs

This list attempts to identify satisfying life choices that support civilization.  What have I missed?  What doesn't belong? 

Israel/Palestine

 What decision by what Israeli leader since 1946 might have resulted in durable peace and justice from the river to the sea?

Proposed test for light-speed symmetry

It is said that we don’t know the actual speed of light going from a source to a target; we know only the two-way speed going from a source to a target and reflecting back to the source.  Conceivably light is faster in one direction than the other.  Perhaps one could test whether light has the same speed in opposite directions by use of the spinning photosensitive disc illustrated below.

The idea is to send a pulse of light simultaneously leftward and rightward from a single, middle source over a fast spinning photosensitive disc.  If the disc spins fast enough, the light pulse should leave an arc shaped mark on each side, left and right.  If light’s leftward and rightward speeds differ, then the arc will be flatter on the side of faster light speed, like the purple-dot path compared to the green-dot paths.  One will not know which side is faster unless the light leaves a side-specific signature, eg a left-right color difference.

         In this illustration, the disc made one quarter rotation as a light pulse (green dots) went from center to left edge and from center to right edge.  It is depicted as it was at the end of that quarter turn.  The purple dots show the path of the right-side pulse if it were twice as fast.  They advanced with the disc as the slower and later (green) exposures occurred.

        Considering the speed of light relative to the speed of a matter disc, this experiment would require extremely fine resolution, since the disc would advance only a few atoms as the light pulse traveled from middle to edge.  But such resolution may be possible, as it was achieved in the LIGO gravity-wave sensor.

        An analogous experiment could be done with a  fast-sliding photo-sensitive sheet instead of disk, or with a fast-rotating photo-sensitive cylinder as illustrated below.  Perhaps the moving photo-sensitivity could be electronic rather than massive, given the speeds implied.

Better governance, better society

Here are some ideas that might improve our society -- decreasing gratuitous suffering, increasing justice and truth.

1.  In the House of Representatives and Senate, every vote should be held twice, once in secret and once overt.  In the secret vote, every member would choose what he/she believes will make America stronger and more just.  In the overt vote, every member would vote as traditionally influenced by the party leaders.  Only the overt vote would be official, but the difference should be discussed.

2.  Double the fairness of the electoral college by giving each state as many electors as it has representatives and senators minus one.

3.  Devise a more just drawing of representative districts by using a computer program that minimizes distance traveled by voters to their polling places.

4.  Each year after a downward revision of tax rates by congress, change the tax rates 10% back toward their previous values each year that the deficit is greater than before the revision.

5.  Place a 1% tax on each person’s net worth above one million.  Alternatively do what Elizabeth Warren proposes.

6.  Modify items 4 and 5 so as to keep interest on the national debt less than the military budget.

7.  Restore original Senate procedures: Simple majority and one-person live filibuster.

8.  Levy foreign-manufacture sales taxes instead of import tarriffs.  This can be accomplished easily now that every item of commerce has a unique 2-D bar code.  This tax would be used to reduce off-shoring or increase on-shoring for the sake of national security and labor support.

9.  Provide communities in which to house homeless populations and outlaw camping on streets.  There could be substance-specific settlements in abandoned mining towns, for example.

10.  Place regulatory limits on off-shoring of US-established manufacturing operations so as to keep a fraction of machinery and expertise in US.

11.  Place high-altitude month-long-soaring camera planes above US border areas to record locations of moving objects one-frame per second (eg).  That way, substance traffickers and other criminals can be located and identified.

12.  Implement a one- or two-year national service requirement for all youth after high school.

13.  Require email promoters to halve the frequency of messages to a given url for each week that they receive no response from said url.  Alternatively or additionally, make the unsubscribe button uniformly easy to implement.

14.  Identify and implement rational, practical and ethical immigration policies and north/south economic relations.

15.  Outlaw high-capacity clips/mags.

16.  Reach out helpfully to latin nations including Cuba, Venezuala and Mexico.

Democrats don’t do dirt

Democrats don’t do dirt.  If they did dirt, Hillary Clinton would have been our 45th president.  For example, when Trump began crowding Clinton on the debate stage, she might have said: “Don’t come so close when your diapers are so full”; or “Don’t crowd people when you need a diaper change!”   And in the present race, when people question Biden’s physical and mental stamina, he could point out that he (Biden) doesn’t wear diapers, in contrast to Trump.  Democrats could have people outside the courthouse to ask Trump whether he needs a diaper change or whether he has considered the prospect of changing his diaper in a jail cell for violating the gag rule.  But, Democrats don't do dirt.

Proposed Internet law

The promoter of a given product must halve the frequency of messages about that product to a given url for each week said messages to said url go unanswered.

The value of email has been greatly diminished by spam.  My children have stopped checking their email because their inbox is so full of irrelevant messages.  They don't have the time to go through and delete the spam or to identify it as spam for automatic sorting.

Therefore, I propose the above law with means to punish offenders.

Laffer’s Errors

 

Some weeks ago, I tuned to the C- SPAN book channel and was shocked to see Arthur Laffer still suggesting that lowering tax rates could cause higher tax revenues.  That lie, told to Rumsfeld and Cheney over cocktails during Reagan’s presidential campaign 5 decades ago, is responsible for our run-away national debt, our unjust wealth distribution and irrational Republican success (Reagan, Bush II, Trump) – irrational in that working-class voters would not have voted for these three phonies had they known that lowering income-tax rates simply transfers wealth from the national treasury to the richest people on earth, namely bond holders.  This has bankrupted the USA, in that we must borrow from bond holders hence add to our debt to pay interest on existing debt held by those same bond holders, a vicious cycle.  That’s Arthur Laffer’s legacy.

The details are as follows.  From WWII to Reagan’s administration, we had a top tax bracket at or above 70% and our national debt fell steadily from 90% of GDP to 32% of GDP.  We were paying our WWII debt despite costs of the interstate highway system and two more wars.

As soon as Reagan lowered the top tax bracket to and below 50%, our national debt began climbing above 32% of GDP, passing 100% of GDP in 2010 and reaching 122% of GDP today: a quadrupling of national debt.  There was a period of diminishing national debt in the late 90s, quickly stifled by Bush-II tax cuts.  As expected from the Laffer/Reagan tax changes, the wealthiest 1% of our citizens went from receiving 8% of national income in 1980 to receiving 18% of national income in 2010.

Reasonable people predicted much of this when the Laffer curve became national doctrine back in 1980.  To the extent that wealthy bond holders are responsible for perpetuating Laffer’s errors, then it is abuse of power.

Instead of starving the poor or increasing the debt limit, it would be better to back off of the latest tax cut slightly.

For details see:

US Macroeconomic History

                                                                                                                                                            Addendum:  The most important consequences of Laffer's "irrational Republican success (Reagan, Bush II, Trump)" is not the national debt, which can still be fixed; it is the growth of right-wing anti-intellectualism, making rational energy policy impossible.  Instead of Jimmy Carter, we got Reagan who tore the solar panels off the White House roof.  Instead of Al Gore who wanted to combat global warming, we got Bush II who started a criminal war out of spite.  Instead of Hillary Clinton, we got ignorant sensationalist Trump.  Instead of international family planning we got the gag rule and widespread food insecurity, immeasurable suffering and the population bomb spilling out of the southern continents.