i’d probably pick
- cartoon tv series can’t have more than 3 seasons
- avocados should have most subsidies of any food
- electron apps are now illegal
- normal tv series can’t have more than 5 seasons
- protruding doorsteps are now illegal
don’t know if this is minor, but
- Ban all billboard ads and force them to have art instead
Art would be cool, but just as distracting if you ask me. I’m more of a fan of billboard prohibition, like what Alaska has (https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Prohibition_of_Billboards,Measure_5(1998))
This makes me think about that banksy artwork that says you’re allowed to dispose as you wish of any ad you’re shown in public spaces
- 200% tax for: cars that go faster than 130km/h, screens above 28", GPUs over 150W, guitars, audio amplifiers using vacuum tubes
- right of way is always in the following order: pedestrians, muscle driven, motorized
- javascript, python, java, CSS 3, spreadsheets and everything .NET is now illegal
- Companies are liable in case of data leaks as well as for critical security issues they didn’t fix or provide patches for within a reasonable timeframe
- mandatory “driving license” for using computers attached to any network
- Companies with job offerings or marketing texts including the following words will for ever be excluded from official tenderings, funding and aid payments: “stack”, “AI”, “culture”, “cloud”, “fixed-term”, “flexible”, “internship”, “driven”, “blockchain”, “agile”
all very good suggestions, but why tube amps though 🤔
They waste energy and resources and have bad sound quality and are somehow still sold as “hifi”. Somehow that bothers me, it’s like selling steam powered trains to someone who already has an overhead line fed with green energy on his train tracks.
Edit: Thinking of it, I forgot vinyl records. They are even worse, they aren’t just outdated, bad sound quality and wasteful, they are also toxic.
You could argue that for hifi but when amplificating instruments it’s exactly the distorsion produced by those lamp that’s looked for and hard to reproduce with transistors.
Yeah, of course you can use it creatively for distortion and saturation, but you can also do this with semiconductors or DSP and if you are such a snob that you really need that specific sound you can just pay the tax :D
The snob tax !
200% tax for: cars that go faster than 130km/h, screens above 28", GPUs over 150W, guitars, audio amplifiers using vacuum tubes
Or, crazy idea (surely), a rich tax that actually brings them down to the level of people they think they’re superior to? I’m not talking about “50% on your income” and some capital gains or something, I’m talking redistributing the vast majority of their wealth until they’re even with the rest of the citizens. Hmm…
That wouldn’t be obscure or minor. My tax isn’t meant to target the rich, but the stupid. (and guitarists)
No more stroads.
- Mitch Mcconnell is not allowed to breathe public air
- he also must eat the silverware and the packaging alongside every meal
- PBS runs a daily broadcast of the entire, lifetime compendium of ways Mitch Mcconnell has hurt poor and marginalized people
- every time he speaks to a group of more than 3 people, a tortoise must rest on his shoulder and should be encouraged to nibble his ears
A company cannot have more than 200 employees in the same city.
Non-federated social networks are illegal.
This should end the need for entire professional degree called MBA.
A company cannot have more than 200 employees in the same city.
How about adding a clause about “there can be no managers nor bosses or shareholders”? :)
Who is gonna run the company then? If you this with my team, chaos follows.
Maybe for a few days/weeks, but don’t you think sharing information and power with everyone can lead to sane consensus? I’m unaware of your specifics, but i would argue that in most productive and service branches, self-organization would lead to much better outcomes in all regards. Workers self-organization has a good track record throughout history. “Autogestion, l’encyclopédie internationale” is a good resource in french about self-organization across time and space (in ten volumes), but unfortunately i don’t know of such detailed accounts in english language.
I am just suggesting it is not for everybody. I do agree that sharing responsibility yields better results.
no outdoor cats. invasive species that destroys local small animal populations
In the United States, I would require spanish language education alongside english from 1st grade through 12th.
Edit: If you downvoted this, tell us why, you coward.
TBH choosing which second language to learn for the students isn’t ideal. Why not just mandate that they learn any second language of their choice?
Because my goal with the law would be that at the end of primary, they know a single language really well. Spanish is the most common second language in the US.
100% serious: No more pushbutton crosswalks (the kind you have to press a button to get the pedestrian green light) at intersections where there is a traffic light cycle anyway (excluding those small crosswalks where the traffic light never changes unless a button is pushed) Why is it needed? Just sync the crosswalk light to the traffic light.
you can get more cars through the intersection with a button, obviously, by not wasting time for pedestrians when there are none.
No, I’m not talking about a traffic light that is completely controlled by the crosswalk button like you see in the suburbs, I’m talking about a specific design that I see everywhere where I live (Metro Vancouver, Canada): There is already a traffic light for cars, and it’s on a regular cycle. If you don’t press the crosswalk button, you’ll never get a crossing light. Even if you do, it waits for the next time the traffic parallel to you is running and there is no protected left, before it lets you cross (you know, like how crosswalk light works any intersection without crosswalk buttons, where the crosswalk is controlled automatically). Also, if parallel traffic is already running when you press the button, it always waits for the light to change to through traffic, then for the light to change again to parallel traffic before letting you through because the controller will not allow a crosswalk cycle that is shorter than the regular traffic cycle, even if there is plenty of time in the current cycle to let you pass (or even if the light JUST changed to parallel traffic).
In short, even with the buttons, when pedestrians can cross is still dictated by the light cycle for traffic. In fact, it’s slower for pedestrians compared to a system where the crosswalks operate automatically in sync with the traffic lights. So why isn’t it just in sync with the traffic lights is beyond me?
I guess placebo buttons do exist in some places, but normally the buttons are part of a complex traffic control system that does improve overall waiting times for both pedestrians and car-drivers.
What we have are even worse than placebo buttons. They do work and you’ll never get a crossing light without pressing the button, but they actively make you wait longer to cross compared to if they were automatic. The buttons, to my knowledge, do not affect the main traffic light timings at all (I haven’t times it with a stopwatch or anything, but I cross a few of the same intersections very often and have never perceived a timing difference between button press and no button press).
I know in my neighborhood that at similar intersections, the traffic light switches fairly quickly if there are no pedestrians, but if you press the pedestrian button it stays green longer so pedestrians of all ages have enough time to get across.
avocados should have most subsidies of any food
Unless you are lucky living in one of those countries that have native avocado trees (and even there the water usage if them often is a problem), buying avocados should be actively discouraged as they are typically shipped half-way around the globe to consumers.
international container shipments are actually super efficient, no? i’ve heard that the last few kilometres of delivery actually cause more emissions than the entire trip they take from mexico or some other country to wherever you live…
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/avocado-environment-cost-food-mexico/
And container shipping (in general, maybe not specifically for avocados) is one of the worst polluters due to running on heavy oil & also makes up for a significant portion of world-wide annual CO2 emissions.
I’m not sure about container shipping, but I’heard the same, that even if of course one ship pollute much than one truck, the quantity they move around is so huge that efficiency is incredibly better. So sea mileage VS land mileage aren’t one the same level at all.
I agree with water consumption though, that is a huge problem from what I understand.
better
The average efficiency (energy/km/kg) is better, but what’s even better is to consume only locally-sourced and renewable materials :)
It’s like the trick “question” green capitalists have about clean energy. Sure you can always make energy cleaner, but “clean” energy does not exist and the cleanest energy is always the energy you don’t use. Same goes for transportation.
but what’s even better is to consume only locally-sourced and renewable materials
Actually, it depends. We did an analysis in one of my university environmental science classes about if you’re living in Montreal in the winter, if you should buy produce from the subtropics (California in our analysis) or local produce. Well, local produce in Quebec is grown in greenhouses in the winter. And as it turns out, the carbon footprint to heat those things far outweighs everything else combined: including transportation. Like, you can get many times more produce shipped straight from California for the same amount of carbon emissions of a single stalk of local broccoli. The difference was so far beyond any margin of error that there was no way we could justify getting local produce no matter how much we tried (I’m pretty sure most people in our class went into it assuming local would win hands down).
The takeaway is: if it’s really cold, food production isn’t efficient and you might just be better off getting non-local food from somewhere warm.
That’s a fair point: the source’s location is not the only factor at play. I’m not familiar with your climate/environment, but i assume the native people have/had a diet tailored to their local environment, and that those greenhouses are meant to produce a capitalist “illusion” of abundance of varied/foreign crops. I’m curious if you have resources on that topic.
Also, from a more technical perspective, it’s quite possible to heat greenhouses in an eco-friendly manner. The productions you’re talking about are likely non-organic and not based on permaculture techniques. There are probably permaculture approaches to cultivating in the cold climates (though i’m unaware of them), but even using “conventional” (read “capitalist”) techniques, producing compost from plant or animal (eg. human) waste is a good heat-generating process.
So while your study holds true, the balance in favor of imported goods is likely due to the types of foods consumed and to the industrial techniques used by industry and not due to the distance crossed by the goods itself. Do you agree with this interpretation?
We had a video a while ago on /c/solarpunk of someone growing citrus fruits in the middle of winter in the northern US in such an greenhouse heated with low-grade ground heat.
So it is definitly possible, but probably doesn’t scale very well.
The real issue is that you can’t expect to eat fresh produce in the middle of winter if you live in Canada. Food preservation for consumption in Winter is a well developed and scaleable technology.
Edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/56369 and specifically this video.
Did you also compare it to broccoli grown in summer and stored in a freezer?
Or for that matter, eating seasonal produce only?
The entire setup of comparing an artificially heated greenhouse in Canada seems specifically designed to make any alternative look good. How about growing produce on the north pole? I am sure the Canadian greenhouse will win against that /s
Freezer might be a viable alternative actually. Especially if you use a heat pump and use the “waste” heat to heat buildings in the winter. Or, even with greenhouses, a ground source heat pump that stores thermal energy in the soil in the summer and extracts it in the winter could potentially also work. Heat pumps can be up to 5x more efficient than resistive electric heat.
The thing is, to my knowledge, the only fresh produce available locally in Quebec in the winter is greenhouse grown because it’s literally too cold for any edible plant to grow in the fields. Broccoli isn’t special in this regard because nothing would be in season.
To be fair the assignment wasn’t really meant to actually inform people what they should do. It was meant to test our ecological impact assessment and data analysis skills that we learned over the term, so they probably did pick a relatively simple example (still with real numbers though).
deleted by creator
All toilets use poo to mint a currency you can spend as legal tender. The toilets use an advanced chemical system to treat, sanitize, and combine with recycled wood pulp to create paper currency. The chemical makeup of the currency is how authenticity is proven.
It is a social safety net style welfare program.
New get rich quick scheme–Doctors hate this one weird trick: Give yourself food poisoning!
I can’t think of many “minor” laws, because it’s hard to really define what “minor” is in this context. So forgive me if some of these are outside the scope of the question.
- Strodes should be illegal and replaced with the most useful motorway for what’s needing to be achieved
- The HOA should not be allowed to mandate the cutting of lawns
- Zoning laws should be changed to make cities walkable
- Suppressors should be fully legalized, and should be required by all shooting ranges within city limits.
- Speed limits should be painted on the surface of the motorway every hundred or so feet, in large enough numbers that even people with poor eyesight can see them at a distance
- Speed limits should be formalized, and greatly reduced within urban areas
- It should be illegal to create unbroken concrete islands in urban areas
- It should be legal for people to park a week or more in any large parking lot, and legal for people to live in their vehicles while doing so.
- It should be illegal to ask a stranger what they do for a living, or how much they make.
It should be illegal to ask a stranger what they do for a living, or how much they make.
It is of vital importance for unionizing to be able to exchange information with strangers about your salary. Making that illegal (as apparently the case in some US states) is just playing into the hands of capitalists.
If you are worried about the “dinner-party social stigma” thing, then you need to think a bit about just how privileged of a situation that is. No offense meant :)
Edit: Looking at the point above… is there somehow an issue with the police asking homeless people about their job and salary? You probably need to explain a bit better what you mean, as it is easy to misunderstand…
imo talking to fellow workers about how much the boss is paying, and a random stranger asking me what I do for a living while i’m just trying to buy glasses are two totally different things.
edit: also i should add that my trade is one that liberals have really strong opinions against (i was called a “baby killer” once for even just hinting at working with firearms) and I’m really fuckin’ sick of having to dance around the question when random people I’ve never seen before in my life randomly ask, even though there’s absolutely no reason for them to need to know. Once I was in the line at a walmart, a carton of eggs in hand, and an old lady came up to me and started asking me a fucktonne of weirdly specific questions. I’d really like if that was in some way prohibited behaviour, because fuck it feels like it should be.
Obviously no-one is forced to answer such questions from random strangers (and at least personally I have never experienced people asking such questions out of the blue), but it isn’t just about co-workers as you need to be able to freely exchange salary information across companies and also different economic sectors to make an informed decision where to work.
The HOA should not be allowed to mandate the cutting of lawns
The HOA shouldn’t exist period. They are a tool by rich/middle class people to keep the poor out of sight and out of mind, essentially forcing them out of “better” neighbourhoods through fees and mandatory spending to keep their house looking nice even over their essentials. They’re also not great for the environment by (in most cases) mandating the presence and upkeep of conventional lawns, which are, ecologically, one of the worst things you can plant. Try planting an eco friendly native grass lawn or a garden of edible crops and you’ll get fined (or sent to jail, seriously). They have also been known to impede the installation of things like rainwater collection systems or rooftop solar panels.
- Pascal and Object Pascal are mandatory as first programming languages in education
- JavaScripts and variants are illegal
- RDBMS must be SQL only and XML as the only alternative for NoSQL
- Rest APIs illegal, only SOAP
- Pedestrians and muscle-driven vehicles have priority in any street
- Only one bus company state-driven
Rest APIs illegal, only SOAP
Hi Satan. On furlough from Hell?
Only one bus company state-driven
Why not self-organized? The transports in revolutionary Barcelona (1936) seemed to work fine as a workers coop.
Also valid for me, the idea was to be just 1 company.
I’d introduce a (municipal) law on homelessness in some medium-sized American city. The nature of the law would allocate some minor funding for a peculiar type of homelessness census (to occur at set intervals), and would also declare certain homeless people to be the responsibility of that municipal government while declaring the rest to be the responsibility of other local governments (municipal, county, and state) based on some rather boring criteria. Such as…
- Whether or not they were born in that city, or have lived there for some significant fraction of their life
- Whether they had worked in that city previously for at least 18 months of the last 5 years
- Whether their mother and/or father would qualify under the same standards
- Whether they had owned or rented a home in that city for 12 months of the last 5 years
- Whether they had been arrested/jailed by the locals in the last 5 years (this is qualifying, not disqualifying by the way)
And so on. The details of qualification are less important than the general idea: that certain homeless people are the responsibility of the locals, and that they can’t shirk responsibility for them. But that others, migratory, are not. Even as they disqualified those homeless people, they’d also be writing up paperwork that proves they are in fact the responsibility of other local governments elsewhere.
I would expect that other nearby local governments would enact similar local laws in retaliation, so it would have a crystallization effect, and eventually most or all throughout North America would do the same. Instead of trying to shirk responsibility for this problem, they’d start to take responsibility for them… after all, it’s a much more constrained problem once you no longer worry about the solution just attracting more homeless to your city, it’s a cheaper problem, and now you’ve declared yourself to be responsible for these people when they meet some reasonable criteria.
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
The criteria can be designed such that 99% of homeless people would qualify somewhere. And the small remainder would then be a much smaller issue, one that we might even expect the US federal government to pick up the tab for.
I get tired of hearing about how it is a problem of compassion or lack thereof, it is 100% a game theory problem.
How is homelessness a game theory problem? It’s a capitalism problem. There’s literally millions of empty dwellings (at least in France and USA) that could be used. How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly, and 100% effective at housing homeless people.
I can’t tell if you didn’t read my comment, or you’re just not very insightful. The trouble with counter-intuitive ideas is that 99% of the population navigates through life using nothing but intuition… and so they’re completely blind to it.
How is homelessness a game theory problem?
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
That’s how.
Though I suppose if you just ship off all the homeless to gulags, in a sense that’s a “solution” too. I can see how that would appeal to some people. But I operate from a place of “it’s not a solution if it hurts other people”.
How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly
Sure. It will be less costly, if you ignore the tens of billions you’ll need to pay your soldiers doing the expropriation.
Or you could just enslave them, I guess. They’d be “free” in the Stalinist sense of the worse, really.
I was talking about some city of 250,000 spending $100,000 over the course of a few months. It’s a price tag so low even I sort of think it’s bullshit. But it’d work.
Sure. It will be less costly, if you ignore the tens of billions you’ll need to pay your soldiers doing the expropriation.
Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure? I agree with you if we talk expropriating the wealth of our overlords, they will recruit militias and put up quite a fight. But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth, so there’s two options to it:
- do it quietly as has always been the case: France already had huge waves of requisitions post-WWII (it’s legal by law for the municipality or the préfecture to do it) and it didn’t create a civil war
- if the owners want to put up a fight, arm the people! why would you need an army? just dismantle the police and distribute the guns and you’ll see suddenly everyone will have a house (civil war is really not my favorite option)
I was talking about some city of 250,000 spending $100,000 over the course of a few months. It’s a price tag so low even I sort of think it’s bullshit. But it’d work.
I’m talking an entire country spending ~50K$ per year to employ two locksmiths full-time to break into abandoned houses and rehouse people. Can’t beat that price tag or its result. Or even better, just instruct the police (or better yet, dismantle it) so that when people do it without any funding, they don’t get in prison for “private property violations” or whatever bullshit they come up with. We live in countries with such abundance of resources that noone would starve or sleep on the streets, were it not for the police.
All in all, i really don’t see what you sense would be wrong with requisitioning empty dwellings, or what this has to do with stalinism. (to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities, and as a squatter i don’t expect any answers from the State; i simply pointed out if they wanted to they could rehouse everyone by just snapping their fingers, and that the housing crisis is a lie just like every other capitalist “crisis”)
Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure?
Because when you requisition those empty dwellings and the owners refuse, you will need a large mechanized infantry to tell them that their refusals are irrelevant. Within the United States, the police authorities might substitute as that infantry, but do you have much confidence on them obeying? Even if they work, they’re hardly cheap. So instead, you go with some cannibalized portion of the US military, but they clock in at something like $0.8 trillion per year… does anyone think of that as inexpensive?
So, specialized? Dunno. But definitely non-cheap infrastructure.
But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth,
Of true wealth, real estate comprises the bulk of it. Sure, Bezos (and most of the rest) have the vast portion of their wealth as stock/equity in various businesses… but that was never true wealth anyway. That’s imbeciles speculating on the shares of companies that (for the most part) don’t even pay dividends. It’s a distraction.
Besides, we’re not talking about Bezos. Whatever else you might say about him, he’s not exactly a slumlord squeezing single mothers for rent money. We’re talking about the guy who managed to squirrel away an extra $80,000 over his long career, and buys some flipper shack to rent out for passive income. He definitely has most of his surplus tied up in that home… assuming he has one of his own, and assuming that home is similar, something like half of his wealth exists in that building and the plot underneath it. If he’s managed to do two or three of those, then even larger fractions of his wealth are invested in those properties.
For him it’s life or death. For you, it’s an academic discussion on some obscure internet forum as a gotcha against another guy who was offering a good faith, honest answer on how to effect positive changes with minor laws. But I guess it’s simpler and cheaper to just mobilize an army and perpetrate unnecessary violence. That landlord, he’s willing to reciprocate to keep it.
to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities,
Were that true, then you wouldn’t be talking about expropriation which requires central authorities. Your solution would be for people to simply squat in those homes… which already happens. And which hasn’t solved homelessness. This really isn’t a problem that capitalism is directly culpable for… when the capitalists find someone squatting in an “empty” dwelling, more often than not, they don’t resort to violence. They give those people a wad of cash to “move out”.
Why this hasn’t solved homelessness is that many of the homeless have severe sociological/psychological issues that prevent them from taking advantage. They need help beyond the “here’s a roof and a door that closes”. That help almost certainly requires a central authority, and those central authorities currently refuse to help. Not because they don’t want to (some do), not because they don’t have good ideas about how to help (some do), but because helping 10 homeless people quickly becomes helping 75,000 homeless people and that’s just not in the budget. Other municipal governments cheat and don’t bother to help if they see one helping… why bother when someone else is doing that? It’s easier, cheaper, and the homeless soon become “far away”.
It really is a game theory problem. And I told you how to create conditions to keep them from defecting so we can have the optimal outcome, and rather than appreciate the true solution, you’d rather do… well, what it is you’re doing now. There’s no hope for the human species. You’re all getting everything you deserve.
So we’re talking minor laws so proper revolutionary actions i will not advertise here… How about:
- all salaries are now equal and shareholders are disowned; workers become the new owners of capital shares
- all jobs of marketing, management and private security/control are abolished ; the police is 100% disarmed (no “legitimate” violence)
- all empty dwellings and spaces are property of the people and can be used to house anyone in need, or to provide non-profit projects with
- all sold products must have 20+ years warranty and spare parts; all smaller/newer brands (<20 years old) can by law acquire warranty from bigger/older brands who have to maintain their products; spare parts must be interchangeable following standards established by consortiums of workers and users
- all healthcare, transport and education is now free
- income tax is progressive so that the maximum you can earn is 2 * minimum wage
That’s the most “minor”/reasonable demands i can come up with. All of this could be achieved through “simple” political will from one day to the next.
i don’t think you want inequality
- 100% inheritance tax
- All citizens shall be provided an anime-like humanoid robot to be their partner without charge
- Marriage with robots should be legalized
- All countries worldwide must donate to research towards creating real-life catgirls
