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

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*** 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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 requir

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. Alth

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-whee

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 ineffectiv

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.

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 eit

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 pun

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.