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29 - Find forces of change, Apply deep values
Iraq may be better modeled as a society with an auto-immune disease that we don't understand and helped to stimulate.
Nuclear power is a problem of design, we haven't known to ask for plants that don't require evacuations that everyone can now see are impossible.
The correct response to global warming is to immediately begin a serious strategy development investigation to explore all the options, say spend two years and a billion dollars to find out what our options are.   Now we're just letting things slide, planning on ever more drastic action in case what seems to be happening actually is.
The source of government interference in our lives is the growing interference between the choices made with business and private wealth.   We need to talk about when and how to stop having escalating impacts on a fragile earth.    The far more jarring realization will come from continuing to ignore the problem.

28 - Fix Spam
If people with internet access wish our attention let us set our own rate for it.   I'd love having an ISP that only delivered paid mail, letting the earnings accumulate in an account I could use to pay for other internet services.   I'd guess that setting a acceptance charge of a tenth of a cent for senders not on my free list would block nearly all the worst stuff and anyone who actually had something to say to you would be glad to pay that for having a more useful service.  I occasionally send emails to 20 or 30 people.   Some might have me on their free list and some not.   If it cost me two or three cents, or even two or three cents apiece, I don't think I'd mind.  I'd just set the delivery charge I'd accept for the particular message and talk with whoever wanted to listen at that rate!     A penny for your thoughts?  6/24/06

27 - Exit Tunnel Vision
There are perhaps many reliable detours to kick you out of tunnel vision, but one that is both reliable and usefully subversive is to locate the valid basis of other people's complaints and respond to them better than they do.   I does have drawbacks, in addition to being strongly counter intuitive.   It often means looking squarely at ugly reflections of yourself coming from the images other people have of you.   The disconnect between our inside views (our image of who the good guys are, etc.) and the views of others looking at us from the outside (using different values and unaware of the inside issues) is structural... and a major source of error and deception.   But I think it's a reliable systems principle that every complaint has some valid basis, and if you can find it you can then gain to whole new ways of response.  02/02/06

26 - Use Natural Election Districts
People have a clear idea of their own neighborhood and community boundaries, and of their affinity with their neighbors on the other side of every neighborhood boundary.    Election district boundaries never match those natural ones, though.  It always seems there's some politician rigging things up for their personal advantage.  We could change that.  Why not let people, assisted by computers, draw their own election district boundaries.   It seems a fairly simple matter to simply overlay the maps drawn by every voter of where they think their immediate and adjacent neighborhoods are, and weight their desire to be politically connected.  What you would get is clustering that could be used to identify how people would prefer to associate at any chosen scale of organization.   10/10/05

There are other, perhaps more important, design issues for redistricting.   My friend Steve Max pointed out the benefit of using statistics to create swing districts.   That way the voters would not get treated as the property of one local machine or another and you'd have a much better chance of politicians entering into a vigorous and informative local debate.   Now, wouldn't that be great!

25 - Copy Natural Systems
Our best source of design ideas has always been nature.   We need a Manhattan Project or Moon Shot style effort to find out what nature does with things that grow exponentially and adapt that knowledge to our needs.   There's a profound disconnect between drilling more oil wells as the earth is running out, as the way to supply an exponential rise in demand.   There's a profound disconnect between efforts to simplify government and accelerate growth, when the increasingly rapid and complex decision making required by growth is the core reason for government complexity in the first place.    What we need more than infinite heights is a reliable and sustainable continuously creative society and life support system.   It should be safe for both investors and the earth.   Pursuing our perfect contradiction to the end is heading us for a very major investment failure.   It's just insane to expect wealth, complexity and the speed of decision-making needed to keep up to multiply by a factor of 16 every lifetime forever (every 80 yr @ 3 1/2%).   I don't think we need to limit individual achievement.   We just need to find and change what makes exponential economic growth a terminal condition.   If you look around nature you find she uses exponential growth and refines stable systems from it, beautifully and gracefully all the time. 10/2/05

24 - Using the People
Why Civil Defense went out of fashion included the stupidity of protecting a society from nuclear war with shelters, as if we could all hide until the radiation decayed and come out to find anything working at all.   Now emergency preparedness has become a service by heavily equipped professionals serving an uninformed and unprepared public.  If people were more involved some of the more obvious errors in the plans would be caught and the community networks would be able to provide essential communication and resources when the other systems break down.

We should require tax payers to have a basic familiarity with local emergency plans.  Providing some simple brochure and QA match test on tax returns would do it.   Because the first line of defense is people taking care of themselves, treat serving as a local emergency preparedness contact something like jury duty, maybe an exemption too. 10/1/09

23 - Using the Pros
The Republicans have complained bitterly about government incompetence and inefficiency and it's time we did something about it.   The destruction of New Orleans by government incompetence sure points out the need to fix the chronic illogic, inefficiency and corruption of government plans.   In much of the world the problem is financial corruption, for us it's institutional corruption, politics as usual.  

What we need is to do is 1) redesign all the bureaucracies to compete within themselves for excellence, and 2) require politicians to go through training by their career professional staffs and 3) protect the staffs from the politicians for speaking out.   

4) We should allow the professionals a 'veto' for incompetent legislation, like slashing critical infrastructure, or increased spending with measurably declining or negative returns.   We should have a minimum two week cooling off period between submitting legislation and the vote. Senior professional staff, given tenure to protect them from reprisals, could make an assessment based on performance measures.  A web based comment process could gage the professional consensus.   Then we could add to a politician's record his support for competent or incompetent policies. ~9/1/05, 9/29/05

22 - Faith Ed
If we can have sex education in schools, can't we have faith & culture education in schools too.   I bet we could figure out how to do that legally and make a great contribution to public schooling.   Our communities really just don't know each other very well and ending prejudice and hatred really requires that they do.   The Christian Right's idea of how to bring religion into the schools is a disaster, of course.   The need and opportunity are to honor everyone by learning about who they really are, especially those you disagree with.   The Right's purpose is almost the opposite and I suppose you'd expect vigorous opposition. 7/1/05

21 - Marketing Security
I think we should raise the bar for Social Security.    The problem is bigger than is being talked about.   Globalization is driving down the standards of employee security generally.   We could bias the market to raise employment standards world-wide instead.   You'd start simple and be fair, but tax businesses and set tariffs according to the "value not added" by businesses who avoid their legitimate responsibility for the security of their employees and their environments.  Then those businesses and countries with good pension plans & environmental policy wouldn't have to pay to play. What other's pay we can surely use to partly compensate for the harm their negligence does. 6/10/05, 10/2/05

Listening to ON POINT tonight, on why we haven't been attacked since 9/11, I was astounded by the central fact everyone seem completely unaware of.  

The threat to us comes from the threat by us to the terrorists and their communities.  We just don't know and don't ask why we're a threat to them, or whether there is anything we could do about it.   Solving that riddle, and eliminating our enemies by making some kind of peace with them, is in fact the only possible way to genuinely defeat terrorism.  

Which do you want, a world where we live up to our own principles, or one where we live in fear and spend all our wealth killing people we don't understand? -- (12/1/04)

I

• Clarity - We need to take more idealistic stands that won't be misunderstood.
  We suffer from 30 years of conservative distortion, a changed world and a lack of visionary leaders.  We need far reaching ideas to make it clear who we are, attract new leaders and serve as an organizing focus for the next 40 years.
  
• Peace - Defeat the terrorists by making peace with the communities they come from.   We need fewer enemies.
  When you think about it, there's no other way to win the battle.  We have to stop being the "Great Satan".   Our other choice is to give up our wealth and freedoms chasing criminals that multiply as we pursue them, a mean and futile task.   Of course there are various kinds of meaningful constructive engagement.   We could also start by just asking, "What would the Great Satan absolutely never do" and find in the answer something we could do that would radically change the climate.
  
• Taxes - Government ensures the fair markets and free competition and the winners get the most benefit.
  The rich owe their wealth to having a very protected environment which made their talent valuable.   The wealth of the very rich is a product of  much larger economic forces than they were really responsible for, and they are morally obligated to be good stewards of  what they fairly gained but is not really their own.  It doesn't matter that the economy is evolving to value entrepreneurs and creative flexible talent more highly.  It's not the government's job to pick winners, but to maintain the commons for the use of everyone.
  
• Stewardship - Earth's environment needs to last us another few thousand years, at least, and we're making radical changes with very long term impact and no plan.   Preserving bio-diversity, wild habitat, clean air and water, and the simple beauty of the Earth, are absolute requirements.   We built most of our cities and are continuing to expand suburban and xurban sprawl, all designed for cheap plentiful fuel.  That'll soon be over.  Global warming is clearly happening, we just don't know how far the climates will shift and oceans rise.   Our whole civilization will soon be simply out of date!   It makes both economic and practical sense to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of the changes that are clearly coming.   The question is how to sponsor good design that would benefit us all in the long run.
  
• Entitlements - Social security wasn't designed for people with long retirements and a non-growing population, but that's what we now have.  Making it worse the Government has been spending all the reserves.   What a mess.    Social security needs both risk sharing to ensure dignity in retirement, and risk taking to ensure the value of initiative.  It was a mistake for pensions to not travel with the worker in the first place!   We are going to construct a fair deal in the long run, but it may be our third or fourth complete redesign before we find what actually works.  
  
• Health - Because of science we have the best healthcare in history, but the "medical industrial complex" is trying to provide us immortality, and no one can afford it.   Good health used to be a matter of luck, but now science has made it a matter of cost, and with insurance someone else seems to pay.   That's why the costs are spiraling out of control.   It'll be a test of our values and creativity but we must find some fair way to cap the costs and let the market then work to make better and better healthcare more and more affordable.   This too may take a few redesigns before we find what works.
  
• Planning - We need better economic and environmental science, and to base tax and fiscal policy and planning for the future on it.  
  Today's entitlements, healthcare and debt crises are the planning mistakes of the past.    We should not be taking such bets on the future wealth and success of the nation based on a president's notoriously unreliable hunches, or debts to political cronies.   Unfortunately that's mostly what we do.   We need solid evidence to make sound decisions.   We've done a great job on weather forecasts and smart weapons, and haven't made similar progress with models of the economy, policy implications and the Earth's natural systems on which we rely.
  
• Speed - The economy is here for the shared agendas of people, not mankind for the economy's agenda. 
  A curious oversight of economic theory is that the real speed of change is proportional to real investment per capita.   Investment means change and change requires adaptation.   Increased adaptation gives us more to do all the time, speed.   Presently investment per capita is designed to progressively trend to infinity (grow exponentially)!  It's a very sly strategy when things aren't moving fast enough, but we haven't yet asked what's enough.   It may already be too late if you think we're already changing too fast to avoid making big mistakes.   Sometimes, nearly always, you get a lot further if you're not is such a hurry.