They put lines down showing what's 2m, demonstrating they admit it's not intuitive

*** DO NOT READ THIS YET ***

*** IT IS NOT FINISHED ***

Many people have this idea that bicycles should be separated from cars, on the roads. This is an old-fashioned car-centric idea, yet often advocated by cycling advocates. It is informed by the assumption that roads are for cars, and anything else must find its place somewhere else. This was true, specifically, in the 20th century.

The road is for bicycles and other mobilité douce. The question is, under what conditions should cars be allowed to share it?

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Bikes are not a single type of traffic, like cars are. There are two kinds of cyclists, which different and conflicting needs.

1. Commuters. Confident mixing with and overtaking cars and buses. Travelling 10-30km/h.

2. Social cyclists and children. Must be isolated from fast traffic. Travelling 0-15km/h.

(1) should only go on the roads with the other fast traffic. (2) should only go on the footpath with the pedestrians. Allowing fast and slow cyclists to mix together is as dangerous as anything on our roads. Just think of the Parc Rives de Seine during summer.

But what about runners, scooters, skaters, wheelchairs, dogs, ambulances? The big criteria is speed. There is an easy rule. Anything unpowered, <1m wide and travelling <10km/h should use the footpath. Anything else should use the road.

If there is a cycle lane, then footpath: <1m & <10km, cycle lane <1m & >10km, road everything else. This is still true for the very wide cycle lanes. The extra width is used for safe overtaking at speed.

So yes, runners should not use the footpath. Mixing with dogs and bins and prams is more hassle and danger than using the road. Yes they will slow down cars. But in this, runners have precedence. From now on, the road belongs to mobilité douce. Cars are only guests.

For some roads, the rule could be relaxed. There are many streets where you would like motorbikes (any powered vehicle <1m wide) to share the bike lane, or buses (any vehicle carrying >6 people). But they must all obey 15km/h.

There favours bus passengers, who are probably in enough stress already, and motorcyclists getting through traffic, who I think should be encouraged for environmental reasons. But 10km/h is glacially slow for them. It's slower than the normal filtering they do in their lane. But it might be valuable to encourage motorcycling and get more people out of cars, those who wouldn't or couldn't take up cycling.

As usual, emergency vehicles like ambulance, gas-repair, can break every rule. In fact anybody can in an emergency. You just might have to explain that to a judge later.

So enforcing the 15km/h speed limit is crucial. This cannot be the job of police. They are not competent at it, and they have better things to do. Cameras are even worse. The solution: A tick mark is painted at 5m intervals along the bike lanes. If there is a spot where people observe dangerous use of the lane, anybody can go out and film the lane abusers, and send the film to the DPP for police. With tick marks on the road, the speed (and the licence number) can be accurately read from the video.

So if people are using the bike lane occasionally, or very considerately or in emergencies, they probably won't be prosecuted. If people are frequently abusing it enough to irk someone into going out and catching them, they will be prosecuted. This is how the law should always work. Rigid enforcement like a robot would do is worse than enforcement only when there is a complaint. Thus the enforcement becomes reasonable and sensible.

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The goal is not to stop people using cars, but to provide them a better alternative. Today, people are trapped in cars by circumstance, bad town planning, bad law, or bad health. The goal is to allow as many as possible to move to better forms. Banning cars makes people's lives worse - taking away a tool they depend on. Providing alternatives like convenient bus and bike routes make their lives better. But the outcome - moving people away from cars - is the same.

Never forget the needs of the drivers. They include the pregnant, old, lazy, sick, tired, those with big cargo, doing long journeys, etc. They need to use the roads as much as anyone. But they will be slightly restricted - just enough to encourage them to switch to other transports if they can.

3. All roads are traversible, but not all routes are traversible

4. why traffic lights are a dangerous predicament.

5. Removing traffic lights helps not just cyclists but the flow of all traffic

6. Making buses and bikes faster speeds all traffic - that famous rule.

7. Speed bumps, pot holes, other damage. Bikes/wheelchairs vs SUVs.

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Walkable distances. Need for amenities locally. Need for more empty retail space and jobs local to houses. Need for Hausemann-style buildings. Vacant space needed too, to keep rents down and affordable for small businesses. Vacant spaces musst be available for clubs etc.

Fast lanes. Like 2nd lane can be 30-60km/h

can always go through red lights like in Nanterre

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Solve a housing shortage or a homelessness, or immigration

Gov/council organises an auction of land and buildings it wants to obtain, by category. For example it might be:

1. Green field sites zoned for housing, >10000m2

2. 10 unoccupied buildings >100m2 which are suitable for occupation, maybe without services but structurally sound.

Land owners are allowed to bid to sell these properties. The lowest prices in each category win the auction. The gov has the option to immediately buy each one (after a survey etc) at the auction price.

A land tax would help here. It encourages people to sell unused property. It also increases the price of food, which leads to less wasteful farming practices. The tax take can fund a UBI which helps people afford higher priced food. So it's beneficial on many levels.

This land will be the unused and useless property in the least populated areas. The government has a challenge to develop it for housing.

Immigrants (and citizens if they want) have the option of living on the greenfield sites in tents. A builder is hired to develop a new town on the site, under contract to hire X percent of the people living there and train them in building trades. Thus a new town gets built. The homeless will build it themselves.

Really it is mad that the homeless exist. They are idle people, who are available for work, for example in building houses for themselves. The only thing needed is organisation.

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This greenfield site should probably be fenced in at first, just for the security of children in tents, or just for a feeling of security for the people in tents. The state should organise a log book of people entering and leaving. Anybody setting up a tent in a city can be bussed there immediately. Apart from that there is totally free movement in and out. This is important, because we might find a high demand from natives to live there, which would be healthy for the culture. Journalists can move in too, to check for corruption or other problems.

New people entering are given an ID card and choose a password. Once they have ID, they can get the dole or UBI (probably at a much lower rate than proper residents). This means they can buy a tent, food, clothes, etc. Who knows what else they might find crucial that the state won't think of - religious stuff, musical stuff, etc. Charitable donations are discouraged but not forbidden. The ID card should probably be like a public transport card. You top it up each day in the state services office (probably a prefab on site) and spend it by tapping and entering your password.

So any business is free to plant a tent on site and start selling the things people need, starting probably with soup and tents. The other way, with direct provision, would be chaos. There would be no way to ensure quality. The only serious way to allocate services fairly and with quality is by allocating people money and allowing businesses to compete for it in a free market.

There is a problem that sole traders do not pay their taxes. One would be a fool to pay. He'd be putting himself at a competitive disadvantage, raising his costs against his competitors. Because nobody else is paying.

There are two separate issues

• businesses are normally structured as a hierarchy. Co-op are more fair, better for wealth distribution, healthier for workers, probably more successful, and more like the natural form businesses take in primitive societies.
• It would be better for society and for the market if there were more small businesses. Markets naturally develop into monopolies, with one or just a few players, because small businesses cannot compete. This leads to price fixing, bad service, etc. Many areas have one big Tesco and nothing else. That's an obvious example, but this effect is much more pervasive.

Here, a coop is defined as a business where all employees have equal vote on big decisions, not necessarily equal pay or conditions or hours.

All of this can be improved at once.

Create a law, that any business organised as a coop does not pay VAT. This has several effects:

1. Sole traders no longer have to pay VAT. So honest ones are not (or are much less) punished for their honesty. It resolves the VAT non-payment problem, in the only realistic way it can be solved.

2. People starting a business can gain a big advantage against the big players, just by structuring it as a co-op. This helps encourage new startups, and makes them better workplaces.

3. There is a lower tax take, but it is probably not significant. It could be nulled by a small increase in the general VAT rate. The new businesses which start because of this will not increase the VAT income. The societal benefits are not fiscal.

Inheritance tax is not working. That's because of a conflict between two needs:

1. Allow people to pass on their property to their wives and children
2. Prevent families from living off old money for generations, and becoming wealthy freeloaders.

This leads to trade-offs and to weak and ineffective taxation. But there is a simple way to achieve both goals fairly with a modified tax.

Someone should be able to leave money to his wife, nearly tax free. If he is estranged from his wife, he should equally be able to leave money to his mistress. If he's not married, he should be able to leave money to a sister, or a friend or neighbour. There is no reason these people should suffer tax, any more than a wife would.

People leaving money to their children should pay a high tax. Grandchildren should pay a much higher tax, because the money is skipping a generation. Really, old money should pay inheritance tax twice to pass down two generations.

Leaving money to a much younger wife or friend. It's debatable whether a high tax should be paid. This argument requires that it should.

The answer is to apply a tax based on the age-difference. For example the tax rate could be 0.5*(deceased_age-beneficiary_age). There should also be a threshold below which no tax is paid. This simple change allows inheritance tax to meet both its requirements, and treat all kinds of relationships fairly.

So this exists. The goals are

• people get financial security by having more than one employer.
• people can change jobs and careers more fluidly. they can experiment with new careers without risk.

There is also an idea I've written about before, of everybody serving 1 year conscription in the civil service. (I now know this is not a completely new idea.) The goals are

• Give a critical mass of people insight into how the public service really works, what are the weaknesses and problems, what is it like to do these jobs. This could lead to societal improvement
• Allow people to try new careers
• Make corruption more difficult. For example if the police were routinely torturing people or record holders destroying peoples documents, it would be much more difficult to keep it a secret, with new uncorrupted people arriving in the office each year, observing all, and leaving again.

It is debatable if this should be optional. If it is not, it could delay people starting their real careers by forcing them to do a job they resent. Or it could be educational, changing peoples minds about their planned career path.

All of the above is good for individuals, for society, and for employers.

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Now combine the two ideas. Like this:

Friday is designated an overwork day. Employees get a legal right to not work Fridays, for any or no reason, with a proportional salary cut.

Employers can hire new people to work Fridays only, with the eventual hope of poaching the employee.

Employees also get the right to 6 months unpaid leave. This can be used to try out working in the civil service or another employer.

This combined policy has even greater benefits.

The technology exists to have cameras everywhere, and we should. Criminals avoid punishment because there is no evidence, especially when they are politicians or police or soldiers.

The obvious special cases are police body cams and dash cams, where some types of crime would stop of people knew they were surveiled.

The trick is to have total surveillance but also privacy.

HDMI is an existing technology where video data can only be transmitted once a secure key is provided. So video can be recorded by a box and encrypted on internal storage. It can only be decrypted and viewed if the user has a certain key.

This is perfect.

Secure encrypted video camera systems can be built cheaply, using existing technology. In general nobody will ever be able to view the recordings.

If somebody alleges a crime, the camera can be brought to court, where a judge can order the key to be found. The key will only be held by a specially elected group of officials who must all be present for the video to be viewed.

This way we can have both security and privacy.

Although it is possible HDMI could be hacked, even if this happens this system is much better than we have today. Today the surveillance is transmitted to many places and people insecurely. It can be used for many things. The recordings can even be remotely deleted after a crime is committed, which does happen sometimes.

I have proposed a way to control inflation.

1. For the sector of interest, require vendors to advertise price changes from one week in advance. They must also advertise the change for one week after the price has changed. For retail this means changing shelf labels.

2. vendors must also list the markup and the price peer kilogram.

3. any price change greater than a limit, for example 5% per week, requires informing the regulator and paying a fine.

4. Prices must be submitted to a searchable online database.

5. loyalty cards and other discount vouchers are forbidden.

Now for a normal economy, these measures all affect various limitations of a competitive market, discouraging profiteering and inflation. But could this also work to correct runway inflation?

Is there any other plan that could work?

There is this problem that farming is cruel. It's improving, but the improvements may never be really enough to make farming ethical.

Seafood farming is worse. The hunting of fish is devastating to ecology. But farming fish is already difficult and probably cannot be done humanely.

Instead, farmers can provide a habitat for the target animals, without fences. The habitat must be humane to ensure the animals stay. Those that do can be slaughtered regularly for food.

This farm is a net benefit for the environment, providing a habitat and thus helping the wild population. It meets the highest standard of ethics, in that the animals are leading their normal wild lives. It is more expensive than enclosed farming, but in the long run cheaper and more sustainable than hunting.

It would enhance the human diet and health by enabling farming of animals which cannot today be farmed, like octopus, shark. So it effectively stops exploitation of the oceans for these foods.

The only extra requirement is ensuring that wild animals don't all congregate there to be slaughtered, leading to extinction. This is tricky. Maybe a requirement to build two identical habitats, provide the same amount of food and shelter in each, but only slaughter from one. The population can be checked by a regulator the day before slaughter, and only the more sparse habitat is culled.

And of course species-specific restrictions are needed like, for migratory birds, no slaughters during nesting season.

One problem with government, even in a perfect democracy, is that it cannot solve local issues. Things like parks, parking, bridges, flooding are always local. They require difficult decisions, study and attention lasting weeks or months, to solve. Often they are only comprehensible to local people. Usually each area requires a different kind of solution.

Democracy is capable of fixing the ineptitude of government. It will change teh nature of government, to be effective, fast, and legitimate. But it cannot solve local issues any better than today's western governments. Effective local government is required.

To be effective, local government needs to be able to raise taxes and build infrastructure. It also needs to exist on many scales. So legislature needs to be created to allow such things to form and dissolve, as local issues arise and as they are needed by communities.

To be clear, conventional county and city councils are not the kind of local government referred to here. Although they are formed through elections, they are not effective at solving local issues.

This is because they are not flexible - their size and powers are appropriate for solving some kinds of problems but not others. For example they are good an building parks and libraries, but not fixing potholes or creating bus routes. They only work well when the scale of the project is the same as the scale of the council.

For example one road might have a problem or project that is not interesting for anyone outside it. It could take years or longer to persuade a county council to act.

Or a transport route might be needed that requires coordination between several councils. They will never agree on the funding.

Local government should exist on many scales, such that their authority overlaps.

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A group of residents of an area should define the area covered, and the remit of the new government. After obtaining enough signatures, this should go to a vote of the area's residents. If enough (for example 70%) of the residents agree, the government will be formed.

(I think that 70% majority should be required for any action, like charging a tax or building something. But for a negative action like abolishing a tax or government, only 50% is needed. So only overwhelmingly popular things will be done. There should be a few other obvious restrictions on their power, like inability to act against residents of other areas.)

Once formed, the government can charge taxes, do public works, make laws, charge fines, etc. Normally the staff would be volunteer, but there would be nothing stopping it from paying people for the admin work that must be done, or hiring salaried staff. But it can only act within its remit and only after passing a vote.

The vote to create a government should be postal, but after that, the nature of further votes should be declared in the government's constitution. Maybe only those who attend the meetings can vote on normal issues.

All of this requires some changes to the law of the territory-level government. But there is much reason to make those changes now.

Speed bumps are the perfect way to punish people for cycling. Using a car or motorbike, they aren't really a problem. But they force cyclists to slow down or swerve to the edge, they give an uncomfortable jolt, and they unbalance.

The justification for adding speed bumps to roads at all is weak, but the fashion now seems to be adding them everywhere. They could at least be done better.

There should either be a flat section in the middle of the road for cyclists. When they need to keep to the left or the right or the road, they need to suffer.

But then what about ambulances? There could alternatively be two narrow flat sections, at the same gauge as ambulance wheels. This is good for people with (for example) spinal injuries, and also serves cyclists who are keeping the left or right.

This answer begs an entirely new possibility. Ambulances could have a special wheel gauge, which other vehicles cannot use. The speed bumps can be set to the same gauge. So only ambulances and two-wheelers can travel unimpeded.

With a small bit of legislation, speed bumps could be useful. They could work as they are supposed to.

What is RIC?

RIC is the first step toward democracy for a modern western state. If you want food security, civil rights, clean energy, anything within the government's exclusive power, then your first priority is RIC. Governments and parliaments will not spontaneously legislate against the interests of big business. What's needed is a way to exclude the government from the law-making process, and pass the legislation directly.

The big problem

But there is a problem. Imagine trying to legislate on abortion. A pro-abortion RIC would probably fail. So would an anti-abortion RIC. And probably so would a compromise RIC. It's because people are much more cautious than politicians. If they are unsure, they will vote against it.

This is a good example because it's one that's important, but parliaments are often unable to legistlate for it. It tends to become deadlocked for decades or more, with no law passed and no certainty about its legality.

But RIC would be just as ineffective as parliament is at resolving issues like abortion.

It's a good example of why so many people favour dictatorships like the French system - if one man/office has absolute power, a decision can always be made quickly. There are never parliamentary deadlocks in France because they are a feature of shared power.

A big reason parliaments fail to legislate for things - there are always a few tiny details which can never be agreed on. The more complex a law is, the easier it is to find things to disagree with. New laws are intended to be permanent, so any flaw will cause big problems for decades into the future. This leads to paralysis.

These fears would cause important legislation to fail under RIC, unless it is implemented carefully. RIC could in fact be worse (more ineffective at legislating) than what it replaces.

The solution

An RIC system with STV solves both of these problems - the permanence of law and the devil in the details.

Once a petition is accepted for referendum. There shall be a period (several months) where people can make counter-proposals on the same issue. Each counter-proposal must also pass the quota of signatures. At the end of the period, all proposals go on the same ballot. The null "don't change anything" proposal is also on the ballot. One law will be chosen using STV.

Since several variants of the law will be available on the ballot, only the proposal with broadest popularity will get passed into law. But the law that is finally passed could be very different from what was originally proposed.

This way, the initial proposal can be simple. If there is a flaw, a counter-proposal can be made to improve on it, iteratively. The same person can sign many of the petitions. If the final law is not perfect, the following year another RIC can be made to improve it further.

All laws are flawed - they are made by flawed people. For legislation to work effectively, there needs to be an iterative process, where laws can be made quickly, then improved later. It takes many revisions to design any thing of quality, including law. RIC with STV gives us a way to do it.

Man is very bad at living in large societies, and has yet to figure out how to do it peacefully. If we can find a good structure soon, we will survive our global crises. There is a known structure that should get us close.

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Primitive society

Small societies govern themselves well. Very primitive ancient societies were all egalitarian - for example all the houses were identical. Pirate ships were formal democracies - anybody could call an election for the captaincy at any time, except during battle. People are naturally able to self-organise, as long as their society is the right size.

But above a certain number of people, society tends to develop a hierarchy, which does not best serve the needs of its people. (The reason for this is not obvious, but might be this: It's when society is big enough that not everyone knows each other. It's easier to exploit people who you do not know, without shame from your family and colleagues. Because they don't know the exploited people either.)

("A societal organisation that serves its people" is not necessarily democratic and egalitarian and socialist, but the obvious example would be)

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Hierarchy (example)

A mechanism of how hierarchy can develop is easy to imagine. The description below is certainly a common mechanism but may not be the only one.

Imagine a society where the wealth comes from farming land. Some people have land and some have not. The man with land can hire people to work the land, then sell the produce, then use the money to buy more land. He can do this with little personal labour, by utilising other people's labour. So the personal labour he expends by owning land does not increase with the amount of land he owns.

He can embark on a cycle of acquiring ever more land and employees, and having ever greater annual revenue and profit. So after many cycles, the small landowners become large landowners, buying up the smaller holdings. The cycle continues until one man owns all the land, and is in control of all the employed people, and all the money in the society.

This cycle is an important mechanism in every society including our own. It is called "wealth concentration" by economomists. It is how inequality naturally grows, unless it is limited by a strong enough progressive tax. If it is not limited by some political process, the ultimate result is a monarchy.

You should recognise the above pattern from any (in fact every) history book.

The example above assumes a society with a currency and formal employment, and where wealth comes from farm-land, but this mechanism works just the same in other types of society. The type of personal freedom is also not relevant (for exmaple chatal slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, economic dependence, free employment). Even in a society with UBI, this mechanism would work just the same. But slavery is convenient for the wealth-owners, so they may create famines (for example the Irish and Bengal famines) to force formerly free people into bondage.

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Mature hierachies and kingdoms

This mechanism naturally leads large societies to become kingdoms. That's why kingdoms are historically ubiquitous. Non-kingdom societies before the modern age were very rare, excepting very small or sparse ones.

[There is a distiction to be made between a feudal society and a middle-eastern style kingdom. The example above is like the latter, where the king directly has power over everybody and everything in the society. In a feudal system, the king employs other (smaller) landowners as his employees (nobles). These people employ smaller landholders, in a formal hierarchy, down eventually to the serfs who work the land.]

Normally, history doesn't play out quite like in the example. Once people become powerful, they hire soldiers to protect their wealth from the poor. They battle other powerful men for control over land. The final stages in the formation of large kingdoms are accelerated, because the power aqcuisition mechanism changes from economic (like purchasing land) to military (gathering armies and taking land).

The powerful, apart from gathering economic and military power, do one more important thing. The gather political power. First, they hire governers to control their staff. The governers make rules. As the number of staff (and their families) living there grows, the governance evolves into laws and courts. This is important for legitimising (in a moral sense) the power of the owner/ruler.

There is really only one stable economic/political system, and it is the monarchy.

This is the most basic explanation of why our society is how it is. Our laws and ideas about property and ownership, about the need for an all-powerful militarised state, about everything, were developed to legitimise a feudal monarchy. They have changed little since then. It is very difficult to conceive of alternative kinds of society, but anarchists have some good (and many bad) ideas about that. Our modern society is still basically like this. The differences, where we have moved away from this kingdom order are much smaller than the commonalities. Everything above applies to modern global society.

The role of religion is important, but can be left for another day. Religion is important for both the ruler in enforcing compliance with the laws, and for the poor in gaining some power. It is a tool that has been wielded in colourful ways in this universal power struggle.

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Governing a mature society

The rulers of large societies need elaborate inhuman technical mechanisms to put order and and structure onto the society. This means documents (constitutions, law) gatherings (parliaments and private meetings within the government, military, spies, lobby groups, etc) layers of militaries and police and security groups, and much more. And even then, most societies have unrest and coups and unrisings and more.

(France is a good example that I'll use here, because its history is violent and colourful. It has all of the features I describe in this article, well documented and widely understood. It seems that everything that can happen in human society has happened in French history.)

Societal unrest naturally ends in a new monarchic regime. Modern attemps to make egalitarian societies (for example France) have been difficult and violent and repetitive. In France there were many cycles of failure and return to monarchy. The result today is only partially successful, in the sense that it is not egalitarian, and has frequent violent confrontations between rulers and subjects. It goes through frequent revisions of the regime. (We are on the 5th republic now. The current violent struggle is over RIC, which would constrain the power of the ruler and give the people a strong democratic power over him.)

But making a large fair society is necessarily difficult, because it is unnatural. It is not natural for people to live in large societies so we don't know how to do it, and it is economically unstable tending to revert to monarchy. Nobody has succeeded in making a well functioning democracy yet.

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Why conventional society is failing us

The trouble with faudal, monarchic, and modern societies, is that they are rigid. They are very bad at adapting to shocks and changes. For example the struggle in ROI to legislate for abortion took decades. Legalisation of recreational drugs, decriminalising addiction, housing the homeless... These things are generally desired by large majorities, and are easy to fix on paper. But society struggles even with these. Vast energy is spent on protests, debates, writings. Even then, governments can take decades to deal with them, or may never do so.

Our political systems may be good at maintaining power for the large wealth-holders, but they are bad at nearly everything else.

Now there are appears the global ecological crisis. And everywhere the problem is identical. Societies desire to make big and urgent changes, in order to survive. But their governance is not suited to this. They are not competent for this job. They only know how to serve the short term interests of the wealthy.

The ecological problem is a good example to show the ineptitude of all global political systems. It is in nobody's interest to fail. Nobody is at fault for the failure. Humans have not yet manages to make a large-scale society which is robust and adaptable in the face of big (or even small) problems.

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How man can adapt and survive

But progress is being made. Each successive French republic is more democratic than the previous. The United Kingdom has split into many new republics (for example USA, India, ROI), each one more democratic than the last. ROI is a good example of a society both advanced towards democracy, and rapidly advancing.

It is quite well understood now, and in good detail, the options for how a stable and fair and effective democracy can be structured. The leading choice requires several minor constitutional changes. We are not far from monarchy, but if we choose the correct path, we are also not far from effective democracy. Particular changes are required to the role of the upper house of parliament (sortition), to electoral rules (score voting), and to the triggering of referendums (RIC). The changes are specific but they are minor and can be done incrementally.

But to change a stable system requires a great force. The challange new is to build the momentum to push for the change. That begins by educating our society through writings and the media. This effort must start today.

Reading this, I'm reminded of something that's maybe not obvious, or maybe not everyone agrees with.

Killing people is not necessarily bad. Animals kill each other all the time, usually but not always for food. Death is a necessary part of life, not a bad or avoidable thing. Massacres are a common and an normal part of human society, both historically and today. Everyone can think of examples of reasonable or justifiable killing. To make an argument against killing as a punishment, there needs to be some philosophical rationale.

And of course there is a strong argument to show that capital punishment is wrong.

The state can punish people, but the punishment should never silence people. People need to be able to exercise the same political and activist activities during and after their punishment, as they did before. Otherwise, the punishment system can be used as a political tool to silence opposition.

Think of Bobby Sands and Eamon De Valera.

There is no need for a moral argument, even if one is possible. For purely practical reasons, capital punishment is forbidden within a democratic system.

Many territories today are "representative democracies". The "representative" is often thought of as a category, but really it is a qualifier. It is like vegan meat or faux leather. It is a distinct system from democracy.

The simplified distinction is that, in a democracy, the people have direct control over policy. They vote on policy, not just on representatives. And they can propose policy too.

Another definition: a system where the government does not have the power to make an unpopular law. And if the people demand a law, they can compel the government to enact it.

There are strong movements in many countries, trying to compel governments to implement pro-democratic changes, notably in France and in ROI in the past 10-ish years. Overall no real progress is happening. But this is not the only route to democracy.

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1 Democracy in one constituency

In a representative system, each representative (AKA TD or MP) has one iota of voting power over public policy. He can use this power as he chooses, but it is hoped that (at least sometimes) he will use it for the benefit of his constituents.

A single TD can choose to use his voting power democratically. He can create an online voting platform, where his constituents can vote on each measure of policy. He can promise to always use his vote according to his constituency's decision.

This is not enough for a democracy. The online platform must also allow the constituents to propose laws. The TD promises faithfully draft them and propose them to the parliament.

The online platform must have a democratic voting system like like score voting, and a debating forum too. Open source software already exists for both those things.

The same thing could alternatively be done using traditional media, mainly by post. But it would be more difficult and expensive and opaque.

The software part doesn't have to be perfect yet, because none of this is legally binding. The system can evolve, and suffer hacking, without huge consequence.

But this constituency will be the template, the example, for a future state-level democracy.

If this TD is successful, other TDs will copy the scheme, until many constituencies in many territories are democratic. Then it is simple to make the legal changes to convert the entire territory into a democracy.

2 A parallel democratic government

A new political party is created. It will be radical, because its purpose will be to act in the interest of the electorate. It will have a second role, to be a counter-balance against the lobby groups for businesses, by acting as a lobby group for the electorate's interests.

Voters can subscribe to be party-members using an the online platform. Then using the same platform, they can decide the party's aims/manifesto collaboratively, at the start of the electoral cycle. They decide on the main campaign issues for protests, strikes, etc.

So it's similar to the first route. It requires more organisation, but is also more effective.

The politicians will have to enact the will of the members. This shouldn't be difficult for them, because their personal views probably align well with the electorate's views, if they were ever to be good representatives at all. As long as they do that, the party will be a novel and revolutionary thing - a democratic party.

If this party is successful and forms a government, then the territory is effectively a democracy. The final step is to enact laws to make that permanent.

You can have an argument about what is the cause of most crashes, or of an individual crash. But it's unanswerable. Journalists usually choose the wrong question, so that it is unanswerable. So the issue seems difficult and complicated ... and interesting.

Normally there is an obvious boring answer.

In this case, you can just do statistics on the problem. Assume the cause is bad junction design. Then make an algorithm which answers "which features of a junction are correlated with which types of accident". Then make the assumption that the cause is bad cars, bad people, bad behaviour, etc. You'll find all the answers that way.

You'll find that it's almost impossible to crash a modern car. ABS, parts reliability, and modern wide tyres.

A certain generation remembers cars which just lost control or handled unpredictably or skidded in the wet. They believe in endlessly tweaking car design for safety. This is obsolete thinking. But the policy-makers of this world are (usually) the old.

For example some people say that speed kills. It's based on an observation that stopping distance is correlated with speed. This is wrong.

You need to gather statistics on how fast people travel versus how often they crash. You make a plot shownng speed versus rate. You control for different vehicle, road, and person types. This plot tells you the range of safe speeds.

So what's true in the elementary physics is irrelevant in sophisticated problems.

You probably find that the safe speed depends on the type of driver, and is generally much faster than the posted limit. Which is what everyone intuitively knows anyway.

You could approach it a different way. Correlate rates of accidents with rates of speeding tickets. If you could show that people who get speeding tickets have more accidents, you'd have a decent argument that speeding tickets are justifiable.

All this is still myopic. It focuses only on accident rates, forgetting things like utility and enjoyability. For example speed, throughput, flexibility, and other things are just as important as safety. Finding the safest possible solution is the easy part. Then you have to decide if you want it or not.

This journalist is complaining that others are looking at the issue wrong. Well he is wrong too!

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If I can give a personal opinion, I think this is a weakness of schooling. People readily accept explanations like "stopping distance is proportional to speed squared, so reducing speed reduces crash severity", which is quite a difficult technical argument. But something like "to find the causes of accidently you find the correlation between each accident type and each factor", people can't grasp that. They ignore that type of insight.

That's because some percentage of people study physics or applied maths as teenagers, so physics thinking has penetrated society. Other types of maths like statistics economics and probability, are not understood. So society is deaf to the insights and benefits they could provide.

In an electricity network, most of the energy is used just in the effort to stabilise the voltage. If you want to save power, you don't start with reducing demand or increasing supply; you start with making the grid more stable.

The biggest instabilities are caused by fluctuating demand during the day and night, and fluctuating supply due to unreliable wind and solar power.

There are three well-known solutions;

1. regulate demand with variable-rate tariffs to encourage users to consume less during peak hours
2. create an energy-supply market where the price changes second-by-second to match the fluctuations. This compels suppliers to continuously match the demand.
3. Whenever there is excess energy, either store it or burn it. Water is pumped up dams or water-towers, and batteries or flywheels are charged.

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But there are two more options: Creating hydrogen using hydrolysis, and mining bitcoin.

Hydrolysis is very inefficient. The whole hydrogen economy is much more wasteful than any alternative, for several fundamental reasons. But if the electricity it is using is free, then it could make sense to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can either be burned again at peak times, or bottled for use in engines.

Bitcoin is always overlooked, because it is considered a failed project. It didn't fulfill the dreams people had for it in the beginning, so now it is considered useless. The trick is do find the right use for it. Bitcoin can solve electricity's problems, and electricity can solve bitcoin's problems. But can together become much more useful and stable.

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At peak times, computers can be turned on to mine bitcoin. They must be left on for at least 15 minutes because of how mining works. Occasionally the power company will win a bitcoin, which wan be stored or exchanged for Euros (or Rubles) or used for trade.

This is an efficient use of surplus power - reducing wasted energy, stabilising the grid, and earning money. It is more efficient because does not require building more power stations, or water towers or other wasteful structures. It can be done anywhere using cheap hardware.

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Bitcoin's biggest problem is the same as the power grid's biggest problem - the energy that is wasted to stabilise the currency. Every 15 minutes, a new block is mined. This means that a new coin (new money) is created and all the global transactions from that 15 minutes are processed.

This works similarly to the energy market. The suppliers who are willing to spend the most electricity on Bitcoin mining will win most of the new coins. The most successful miners consume vast electricity in this effort.

This is controlled by the "difficulty" parameter - how much electricity must be consumed (on average) to create one new coin. When the difficulty goes up, it requires more electricity to win a new coin, so it becomes more expensive and less profitable.

Imagine a new miner enters the market, who has access to free electricity at certain times of day. He turns on many mining machines and starts earning coins, and pushes up the cost of mining (the difficulty) for everybody. Now it is not profitable for the other miners anymore. They are forced to stop mining.

All the existing mining businesses will stop. The world will stop using its electricity for mining, except for the excess grid energy.

This also pushes down the price of mining equipment, making is easier for the power company to buy more.

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Bitcoin has another crippling problem. It is controlled by its miners. A majority of miners can control everything about Bitcoin. They can change any rule. Bitcoin is the global digital currency. Usually they choose to do nothing. Historically, efforts to solve bitcoins problems have failed just because the miners did nothing.

Bitcoin is a new technology with diverse unexplored power. It would be a very useful thing for a few governments to gain control over Bitcoin. They could solve all its existing problems (like the block-cap and the mining algorithm) and have a hand in its future development.

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Bitcoin is a very useful tool. It is irreplaceable as a economic tool. Finding a large-scale use for Bitcoin is very important for the future of the world. But that's out of the scope of this article.

In summary, power companies starting to mine bitcoin at peak times has these outcomes:

• Crash the Bitcoin mining economy. Solve the global scourge of bitcoin miners wasting energy.
• Stabilise the power grid without the need to expensive infrastructure.
• Generate money for the power company. This money can be used to buy Russian gas for example.
• Create a legitimate use for Bitcoin.
• Gain control over Bitcoin and its development.

This is a very valuable project. We need to start it now.

There is an electricity/gas crisis, a food crisis, a water crisis, crises of both methane and carbon dioxide emission, and many more. governments are doing a lot of beating around the bush, when they could solve them all quickly.

You tax the scarce thing at a high enough rate that consumption drops sharply. You use the tax income to subsidise the people who really need the thing.

Take methane for example. You calculate (roughly) how much methane is produced per kilo of beef, per litre of petrol, per tonne of fertiliser, per metre squared of concrete building. Then you add a tax on each product, fairly, according to how much methane it produces. But this causes prices of beef, grain, concrete buildings, and everything else to rise slightly. So you give back the tax as UBI, or doles increases, or VAT or income tax reductions.

So the affordability of food does not rise at all, yet there is a strong incentive to use less fertiliser, and to farm and buy meat which produces less methane.

There is nothing complicated about this. It can be done quickly.

The best thing for the planet is to keep using old vehicles for a long time, even if they are more polluting. More damage is done to the planet during the manufacture of the vehicle than during its lifetime being used.

Which is why the solution - for everyone to but a new electric car - is the worst solution. It's only good for the car companies.