Ideas Focus on privacy and ownership of data education government prioritizes the life of citizens - how? health care agriculture climate change - agriculture waste  burial Left out Path to achievement, time line Climate change denial - we can recycle our way out of climate change Pretend that the rest of the world doesn't matter Narrow idea of government - basically just vanilla socialism No vision of society, control, multi-level government or citizenship "the" government "finally gets it" No mention of scale Hand waving about climate change  Agricultural plans inefficient without automation, and fertilizer, so how do you feed the population Hand waving at information issues - just privacy, no AGI Data questions are not just computer issues. Ownership of information a bigger issue

Socialism and Capitalism are both ways of combining theories of value with practices "on the ground" which purportedly reflect these perceived values. SOCIALISM It seems that Socialism pays special attention to three value-related concepts: "Fairness" in the system of allocating things of value . This needs to be unpacked a bit since there is a different concept, also called "fairness" in capitalism. The two concepts are so different that we can see part of the dispute as encouraged by a problem of language. The same word used in opposite senses, as in " newspeak ". Equal influence on public policy. The "government" should act on behalf of all citizens and not be dominated by a certain segment. Being "rich" should not equate to being politically powerful. One person, one vote, not one dollar one vote. Since "Socialism" is fundamentally a political world view , "socialists" are, of course, willing...

Thieves of State " Thieves of State " is about a particular form of society - sadly perhaps the most common form of society - a kleptocracy. "Thieves" goes into a lot of detail about how individuals are drawn into (assimilated into) this form of society ("dragon"). The examples allow us to drill down to get a close-up view of how assimilation takes place, how it is almost inevitable and why it is so difficult to resist. It's hard to find an example of a social form that doesn't feature a "strongman" (usually but not always male) with built-in mechanisms that draw group resources to the strongman and his immediate family. This is as true of a Canadian "first nation" as it is of the Trump administration in the USA. Chayes describes how this phenomenon permeates the whole society in a kind of fractal structure, with layer upon layer of mini-strongmen paying up to the strongmen above them while extracting resources from humans below...

Laughlin's " A Different Universe " provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.   Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain. Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin. Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about t...