Government

I think, in general, it's difficult for governments to work as intended. You can get the design right for a specific frame of reference, but things change, and systems that are designed to resist corruption can lack the agility to keep up with the times.

Alternatively, your systems can not be designed to resist corruption, and then they get corrupted. Haves will subjugate have-nots. That's not news.

I look at what my government is doing, and I'm pretty much disgusted. It's election season, and there's a lot of shouting about how important it is to go out and vote, but I'm not sure it really matters as much as it once did, or should.

For one, I think there's too much going on for the electorate to be expected to be well-informed enough to make good decisions about who to elect. Things like economics are complicated on any scale, and things like free trade agreements make them more complicated than ever. As systems expand globally, the consequences of actions become tougher to predict, and you run into more and more situations where there's no precedent to look to for guidance. When it's difficult to even make decisions on a case by case basis, making policy is nearly impossible.

Two, the little guy has next to no voice. No ability to sway their legislators compared to the companies putting money into their pockets. You can blame the legislators for being corrupt, or having weakness of character, but it's just the economics of the situation. The systems are set up to incentivize that behavior. The game is broken.

Three, I don't even know if it makes sense anymore to have a representative democracy. You can ask millions of people what they think about something at the drop of a hat these days. They do live surveys on TV where people watching can vote, with results on screen in real time. What's the point of a representative when you can just ask me what I think directly, point by point, on demand?

Ultimately, I think our current democratic systems are too lumbering to be effective in the face of the rapid change that's being brought on by technology. They lack agility.

I lamented a lot of my computer science education when I was in college. I didn't want to be stuck in a four year program where they laid out the graduation requirements when I enrolled, because I knew 4 years was an eternity in tech, and I'd be responsible for self-educating throughout my life to keep my skills current, so I didn't see the point in spending so much on school when I could be investing it in a business. I still have mixed feelings about this.

My point is establishing laws is like this now. You don't know what's happening in 4 years, and it's probably better to work on that assumption (by making a short term decision, and planning to evaluate the results and make course corrections in short order) than to try to guess and hope it's like you thought it would be.

I'm not Mr. Agile Software Methodology, but I think there's a lot of merit to it as an approach to work, and I think the fact that it lets you make adjustments as tech changes is a major selling point that's underappreciated. People focus a lot on the minutiae of the implementation (exact length of sprints, frequency of meetings, etc.) and maybe miss the point sometimes.

I've mentioned this before, but I think the weakening of collective bargaining has been a big problem, and is what drives things like the top 1% taking almost all of the gains of the US economic recovery after 2008, and the general feeling of voter disenfranchisement.

You'll hear some people talk about how if you taxed the top 1% at 100% it wouldn't be enough to fund the government, and this may or may not be true. I don't think it matters. The issue is wealth, rather than income, and the relative ease of the individual to exercise executive control over their assets as compared to collectives. The lower classes may have a greater share of total income or wealth, but they can't leverage it without great effort and tangible sacrifice.

Jobs are getting outsourced to workers more willing to work for less money. I think this is natural, and is something you could delay with policy that prevented free trade agreements, but I think that labor pool homogenization is just something that will happen, and there isn't a lot of point in trying to fight it.

The thing is, I think that opening up the world as a labor source is something that should make wealthy owners terrified, because if that labor force organizes for collective bargaining, they're going to take everything. And I think they should. I don't think private ownership of things is really a problem, but I think it's grossly overrewarded.

I think crowdsourcing is a big game changer, and I think that if the model were applied to labor somehow, you could get some sense of balance back. I've thought about it in terms of managing strikes, and not bothering to walk out until you hit some critical mass that would cripple an antagonistic corporation. Same thing for boycotts.

Being an individual striker or boycotter is generally fruitless and, if you're striking, singles you out for firing. But if you could be guaranteed to do damage and effect a change, I think it's much easier to justify the risk, and just the number of bodies involved affords you a certain amount of protection, in that if the strike is large enough to hurt a corporation in a few days, firing all of those people won't help, and would destroy it in terms of public relations.