If I Ruled The World

Rules decide how the game is played, not the players. Change the world, by changing the rules.

Each player is trying to maximise their outcome of the game. Nothing significant happens by changing the players.

Governments

IMHO, choosing who to vote for in the next election isn't going to change the world. Changing the voting rules will.

A few years ago, the Liberal Democrats held the balance of power in the UK. They were !king makers", they could choose which of the two major parties would rule the House of Commons, and who would be Prime Minister.

They chose Blue, and one of the concessions Blue had to make was a referendum voting reform.

My constituency is a safe seat. Nobody bothers to garner my vote, because it is a waste of their time (and mine). They cannot affect the outcome, and neither can I.

I do have a choice though. I can choose to erode the major party's lead, by voting for the 2nd biggest party (therefore ensuring that both main parties *will* care about my vote in the next election) Or I can choose to vote for the party that I believe would do the best for my community (assuming a miracle happened, and they got into power).

Imagine that 50% of my constituency want to vote Green. Half of them (i.e. 25% of the total) voted Blue last time, and are very scared that Red might win. They do the maths, and decide to vote Blue again. The other half (i.e. 25% of the total) voted Red last time, and are very scared that Blue might win. They do the maths, and decide to vote Red again.

Green gets zero votes. This is fist-past-the-post democracy in action.

Change the rules, change the world. Let's try a different voting system. Voters can rank their choices from 1 to 3.

Let's see what happens with this system.

50% of the people choose Green as their first choice, half of them put Blue second, and the other half Red second. They are all "safe" to do that, because assuming Green loses, then their second vote will still count.

Instead of getting zero votes, Green now has a landslide victory (in the first round; there isn't even a need to look at the 2nd place votes at all).

Brexit and Voting Reform

IMHO, The voting reform referendum was *much* more important than Brexit, and yet people barely even remember it.

If the voting reform referendum had passed, then, IMHO, the Brexit vote wouldn't have even taken place. Cameron set the ball rolling, assuming it would fail - he was a "remain-er". He did so in order the dampen the pro-Brexit factions within his party.

Cameron feared he would lose votes to Brexit parties, and Labour would win the next election.

However, if PR were in place, then right-leaning pro-Brexiters would vote Brexit parties 1st, and Conservative 2nd. Their 1st vote would be discarded after then first round, and their 2nd vote would have counted in the second round. And therefore the Conservatives wouldn't lose any votes.

No fear of lost votes, therefore no Brexit referendum.

Weak Government

First past the post tends to give strong, stable governments. PR leads to weak governments, with no overall majority, with fractured parties continually needing to do deals with other parties.

This is a valid argument. Maybe having a Strong Government outweighs the negative of an unfair voting system. My one word answer is simply : Germany.

After World War II, West Germany's constitution set in place a system of PR, with the explicit goal of preventing a single party becoming dominant. Look how badly they have done since (sarcasm)! If you asked the average German, would you prefer the USA's voting system, their answer "No!" would be drowned out by their laughter!

Maybe that's not fair, because USA's electoral college really is a joke. But I assume Germans pity us Brits too, with our standard first past the post system.

Another argument against Proportional Representation is the need for representation - voting for a representative, rather than a party.

Where were these people when the UK changed Prime Minister multiple times without an election? The first past the post system in the UK *is* a party based system. We do not have an elected leader. We never have.

5 of the last 6 PMs came to power entirely outside of the democratic system. 4 out of the 5 never won a national election (Johnson being the exception). Note, this could go down to 3 out of 5 if Sunak wins the next election.

Software

So what rules should we have for software?

1) If you sold a product that requires cloud services, then there must be a mechanism to ensure that service is available for the lifetime of the devices. This can be achieved in many ways.

A proportion of the sale price is placed into a fund, which pays for that service. If the company goes bankrupt (or chooses to close down their servers), this fund can continue to pay for the cloud service.

Alternatively, give the server code to a 3rd party, and if the server is stopped, the 3rd party releases the code, so that anybody is able to provide a replacement service. I realise that this is a "big ask". Currently there are lots of rules, which prevent software being reused!

2) Auto-unlock DRM. I'm against DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), but if you choose to use it (I don't), then I don't want to ban you. But I still want to protect you. If you "buy" a book, music, a film etc which uses DRM, then the master keys must be given to a "trusted" 3rd party. If the company goes bankrupt, or otherwise locks you out from the content you "bought", then have a mechanism to release the master keys, so that the DRM can be removed. Note, the rights holder won't want this to happen. In which case, the rights holders can choose to pay for the upkeep of the DRM servers themselves. The choice is either 'remove the DRM', or 'permanent access'. The current rules allow the content to be unreadable, so the "buyer" is left with nothing, and no recourse to compensation.

3) A gradual move to free software.

I would start at the national government level. All software needed for the smooth running of the government must not be dependant on foreign powers. IMHO, this is just common sense, and I'm shocked that country does this.

So no proprietary software from overseas companies. All software must either be from domestic companies, or free software.

I would then extend this rule to critical infrastructure, such as power distribution, telecoms, water etc.

Then the same rules for local government.

Only now can we call ourselves a sovereign country (or "block", because "domestic" could mean Europe wide for the EU nations). We have removed "trust" from foreign powers.

At this point, I see no good reason to go one step further, and require all government and critical infrastructure to be free software. Note, this does NOT mean governments cannot buy software, quite the opposite. I expect them the buy free software.

The government does not employ road builders, they buy services from construction companies. But once the road is built, the construction company has no say in how the road is used, or what happens to it. If the government want to repaint the road markings, they are free to do so. This is NOT the case with how governments currently pay for software. They cannot do the digital equivalent of repairing, or improving roads without going back to the people who built the road.

So, government will buy services from software companies, and once the software is built, the government owns it, free to do with it as they want. They can improve it, repair it, give it to other governments. The can also pay another (or the same) software company to repair or improve it. This is what freedom means!

You may think this would be expensive. Microsoft employ an ungodly amount of people, so the cost of a PC operating system would be huge! (Remember, Microsoft would only be able to sell it ONCE, rather than once per PC). The UK wouldn't be able to buy it. The price for Windows would be too high But the current sales price of Debian Linux is £0.00, and IMHO, it is much better than Windows. The reason we use Windows right now, is not related to the price, or the quality of the software. It is related to momentum.

It costs money to train people to use computers. It costs money to teach people to maintain computers. For Windows, these costs low because people are already are familiar with Windows. People already know how to maintain Windows.

But if you follow the steps above, momentum will flip in the other direction. I suspect that the cost of reversing this momentum will be *slightly* higher than the current price of Windows. i.e. it will cost slightly more in the short term, but not by much. Why? Because that's how Microsoft determine their prices! If they could get away with charging more, they would. They can't because if they nudged it up a little bit, large organisations, such as government, would pick an alternative (such as Debian Linux).

I could go on, and add extra rules to ensure consumers get good deals from software, but if we get to this point, these rules may not be needed. There would be so much free(dom) software required by governments and critical infrastructure. Every phone, PC, and tablet used by government would be 100% free(dom). Governments would pay money to improve their phone software, word processing software, spreadsheet software, database software, email, chat, drawing, presentation... There would be such a huge change in momentum, I suspect software would change forever, to be more like roads or houses. Pay for it to be built once, and then you own it. And because software (unlike roads or houses) costs nothing to duplicate, everyone can have whatever software they want for free (without the "dom" - i.e. $0).

Teachers

I was lucky to attend good schools and have good teachers. They were regular government funded schools; I just happened to be lucky that my local schools were above average.

I once told a teacher friend of mine, that teachers should be paid more. I think he took that as an insult, that he was currently underpaid. I didn't explain myself well. So here goes...

Most salaries are determined by the market. There are lots of jobs available, and people are free to choose their career, based in part on how much money they can expect to earn.

My idea is to deliberately break away from the "invisible hand of the market". Instead of offering just enough money to ensure that all teacher posts are adequately filled (which is what the market would do), let's decide to offer MORE.

Now we have an excess of candidate teachers. For example, people who would otherwise become geologists, would now consider becoming geology teachers. (I assume Petrol companies pay geologists well). Software developers would consider becoming teachers, rather than working for banks (that's me!) Likewise with all other specialities.

We won't hire *more* teachers, we will *reject* more candidates, and therefore we have a chance of hiring *better* teachers (from a larger candidate pool).

I make this distinction for teachers, because they are an investment in our future. The banks and petrol companies will get slightly worse workers for 20 years (because the best are now teachers), but after a generation, all institutions will have better workers, because they the new recruits are taught well.

Teachers are an investment in our society's futures, and schools shouldn't be competing on a level playing field (regarding pay) with short-term thinkers, such as Banks and Petrol companies. Schools should be given an "unfair" advantage to attract talent.

Science

Popular news often conflate science and engineering. So let's start off with a definition.

• A good engineer is someone who makes something that works.
• A good scientist is someone who makes something hoping it will fail.

This is tongue in cheek obviously. Science is the process of coming up with clever ideas, and then trying to prove they are wrong.

Newton had an idea : F = ma (Force equals mass times acceleration). A good scientist then sets up experiments to test if this is true. She is trying as hard as possible to make the experiment fail, to prove Newton wrong. Alas all of the experiments performed as expected. Yet Newton was wrong, the experiments weren't good enough to show the flaw!

Another fella came along and claimed Newton without proof. That fella was Einstein. We had to wait for technology to improve until we could design and build an experiment which accelerated things to such high speeds that relativity became dominant, and at these high speeds F = ma no longer holds.

The scientific approach can be applied to many questions.

• What is the best way to teach music
• What is the best way to design a city
• How do we make bridges / buildings strong

The scientist come up with ideas, and then test them, trying as hard as possible to find fault in their ideas.Meanwhile, the "engineers" take the current best practices, and implement them.

Architects design bridges based on the best knowledge from the successes and failures of past bridges.

Parent and teachers teach children to play music using the best knowledge from the successes and failures of previous music lessons.

City planners build cities based on the best knowledge from the successes and failure of previous cities.

Only kidding, of course they don't. City planners continue to make the same mistakes again and again. Parent and teachers haven't a clue how to teach music. Most aspects of our lives are like this. We either don't collect data on how to do things well, and if we do collect the data, we don't apply it.

I chose those three professions because architects are engineers, who rely on scientific knowledge, and the other two professions are related to insightful YouTube videos I've watched recently :

• The Bad Way to Teach Music to Babies - Tantacrul
• Crossing the Street Shouldn't Be Deadly (but it is) - Not Just Bikes

It bothers me whenever a politician says "My idea is better", and then give zero evidence to back it up.

Political Lobbying

This one is easy.

Set a cap on donations to political parties. Only people can contribute (not companies or other organisations).

Set aside a small amount of money from the tax-payers purse for leafleting campaigns.

In addition, buy "air-time" (an antiquated notion in today's world) for political debates.

Each party hosts a 1 hour slot where they can interrogate other candidates. The only rule during that hour - they are not allowed to mention their own party, nor their own party's ideas. They aren't allowed to name any of their own candidates (unless another candidate mentions them first).

Note in an ideal world, the host would be "neutral". But neutrality doesn't exist, and the next best thing is adversarial, just like we see in a court. Each "side" is free to ask questions and to force the opponent to answer.

I hope that such an interview would be so frightening to candidates, that many would prefer to be seen as chicken. So, if a party chooses not to turn up, then the hosting party may use that time as an advert for their party instead.

This idea is based on Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" Series 1 Episode 9 - The Mock Debate.

City Planning

My local hospital's website begs its visitors to come by bike, by foot or public transport and not by car. That bothers me. The sentiment is good, but not the implementation. It would be far better if people preferred to come by foot/bike/bus.

Despite what it says on their web site, the infrastructure has been designed with a car-first mentality. The roads are wide and plentiful, the road signs are clear. The parking is easy to use, and of good quality.

There are no bike lanes, the pavements are not direct. There are lots of curbs. Where cars and non-cars cross, the road is flat, and the walkways change level (curbs with periodic slopes).

Have a quick look at Not Just Bikes, and you will soon spot good pattern (which are rare/non existent in the UK) and the anti-patterns (which are everywhere).

If you want to encourage walking / public transport / bikes, the solutions are easy. Just do the opposite of those above.

• Wide plentiful pavements and bike lanes.
• No changes of level for pavements or bike lanes.
• Where cars and non-cars cross, make the road rise up to the level of the pavement/bike lane.
• Make roads narrow, and not straight (this encourages drivers not to speed).
• Pinch points and ramps where roads cross pedestrian walkways.

Note that there is no need for pedestrian crossings - cars cross pedestrian walkways, not the other way round!

Make it clear that cars should *always* yield when there is a pedestrian on the walkway that the car is trying to cross. Use colour, and changes in elevations makes it clear that the cars are 2nd class, and must yield to pedestrian. Where the road and walkways cross, the intersection is the same colour and height of the walkway, not the road. Making the road narrower (with a bollard) at the intersection also encourages drivers to slow down.

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