Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[The Islands of Versilia]

Hi,

If it isn’t a bother, would some people mind explaining to me UBI and other welfare systems? I want to add more detail to the welfare and benefits system of Versilia but I lack sufficient knowledge or any real details. Some suggestions of "optimal" welfare systems centred around encouraging employment and personal development would be nice too.

Thanks.

[Taihei Tengoku]

The welfare system that encourages the most personal development and the least disincentive to work is simple: don't give out welfare. You personally develop into someone that can support you or you die. UBI is really a secret plan to suppress Low Quality Persons by giving everyone the same amount of money all the time.

[Gallia-]

Personal development is a bit of a meme, since "development" is pretty much entirely predetermined by random factors during the gestation process and can't be reasonably altered from the genetic trajectory by changes in environment, TBF. It's really just a long run genetic test to determine if someone was born with the right combination of expressed alleles for survival in a particular environment. Then again if we assume personal development is real, then we also assume welfare is going to work, unless "personal development" doesn't imply deliberate alterations of environment through accommodation methods is a viable method of changing long term behavior. Taking the random factors out of genetics and putting it into some sort of always nebulous "will" or "motivation" factor tends to produce the idea that people can be altered by growth mindsets or whatever, after all, which has never been true.

OTOH, if "welfare" means "give money out, conditionally" then it won't really work either, but that's a really narrow definition of "welfare" when things like "unconditional literacy/job training" and other forms of public education, healthcare, and support count as "welfare", too, in the sense that they're "something given at no cost to an individual in expectation of future returns to the tax base/labor force". Unlike money given with semi-random and impossible-to-meet moral demands (only single mothers can live in Pruitt-Igoe, so why is the African-American family breaking?!), these have very real effects, but the expression of the effects is still bound by random genetics. People who get into fights in schools and get kicked out to "alternative programs" are not realistically going to change or adapt over time, they will always be rowdy, and there aren't a lot of jobs these days where rowdiness is a useful thing to possess.

If you're too squeamish to kill kids directly you can exile them to the wilds or put them up for international adoption by other states, otherwise you'll probably need to find a way to link genetic mapping to HEXACO traits and just kill the babies that won't work in 15 years or something. Of course also this won't get rid of social parasites in the slightest, since people will still be able to do insurance fraud or something like this and make money off it through settlement, but to do that you would need to eliminate all by class action lawsuits or something, since this is actually an effective strategy that has been identified by evolution and exploited by people possessing traits which have been found to work in industrialized societies with the typically developed tort systems.

In this sense, I suppose we can define "welfare" as "tort settlement" or something since that is how most egregious parasites make their money. But terrorizing small to medium size businesses by falling down escalators or pretending to have spilled methyl alcohol on your dress in the one place where there are conveniently no cameras in the store and somehow getting hurt is usually how they make money. By comparison, having depression or being unable to hold a conversation is relatively harmless (you might call it a "victimless crime") but has far worse personal consequences in general and in terms of reliance on public welfare such as education and labor training, which can be abstracted as money spent per capita per year or something through taxes.

I'm not sure how UBI will solve anything except make really harmful social parasites, like personal injury fakers and drug dealers themselves, happy by giving them free paychecks and encouraging them to supplement their income by falling down more escalators or cooking meth tbh. Since these people are relatively incapable of anything involving actual skill (otherwise Jim-Bob would be a chemist or auto mechanic and Sue-Bob would be a waitress or something who doesn't have half a dozen kids she can teach the art of the deal to), whereas most depressives and autistics require minor (well, not really, but it's minor in terms of absolute costs since there aren't a lot of true depressives or autistics in any society, otherwise 1/3rd of American youth workers shouldn't exist and New Jersey's autism stats would be 1:100 not 1:33) but chronic coaching through life but can otherwise hold down a job like being a mechanic or truck driver or something and fill out the annual tax form once they know how it works, pulling that system out from under the rug is somewhat of an economic/government policy Mad Minute that would miss the worst offenders and punish the least damaging ones. For most people this sort of coaching is (or perhaps I should say, was) done by parents or asking close confidants for advice or something, but when these structures break down you only have the state guidance counselor to turn to for advice on grilling steaks or talking to women!

Finding out a way to attack fake injury claims will end up saving more money in both long and short runs than dismantling Food Stamps, since insurance fraud costs more and is pro-cyclical while food stamps are counter-cyclical. OTOH if you really wanted to to nip it in the bud, I guess food stamps might just require forcing businesses to offer healthy food in smaller portions instead of being machines to make children diabetic at like 7 or something I guess.

tl;dr Give every child a HEXACO personality inventory at 14. Alter the education trajectories ones that don't fit their caste's Platonic form but fit another. Prune the ones that fail to fit into any caste.

You can determine the HEXACO forms' appearances by committee or something.

Everything else will fall into place after that.

[The Islands of Versilia]

Well, that’s definitely very informative and something I’ll keep ahold of for future reference or later analysis. Thank you.

[Gallia-]

Well, that’s definitely very informative and something I’ll keep ahold of for future reference or later analysis. Thank you.

"Titty" is correct in that giving everyone the same amount of money will sort them by their ability to make money into more money, though by adulthood (i.e. the median age of most welfare recipients is somewhere around the early 20s) it's not possible to change how someone manages money. Either they do it well or they don't, like basically everything, since you are now a complete person and any "growth" has stopped since your brain has ceased its childhood-teenage development process.

I'm just fairly convinced it won't do anything to dent the insurance fraudsters, who have figured out the way to make money from more money is to make money from other people's money, and are responsible for a lot more financial losses for companies than paying taxes, since once you get big enough it turns out most companies will pay zero taxes anyway. In terms of parasites, racketeering, and actual damages to economic growth and reinvestment, insurance fraudsters are the biggest both in terms of money paid out and in terms of chronic welfare support. Most everyone else, besides maybe certain populations of high functioning autistics who require chronic coaching, use welfare as a temporary lubricant in between jobs or to patch over hard times.

An unconditional UBI might work for people who need to fix their car or save bills for a rainy day fund and their employment doesn't cover it, too, which turns out to probably be like half of Americans. Maybe more.

If you could cut insurance fraud in the United States in half and translate that into taxes you'd pay for food stamps, basically. I don't mean just underwriters embezzling funds, either. A fifth to a third of personal injury lawsuits are probably fraudulent and most injury lawsuits are settled (it's mandatory under certain amounts of money at most companies because it's cheaper that way, and fraudsters aren't organized so it's usually just one loonie throwing herself down a flight of stairs or whatever) in America. Personal injury lawsuits are probably, unlike worker's comp, not pro-cyclical but rather just sorta steadily increasing over time. Since 95% of personal injury suits are settled the vast majority are quite literally "free money" and it costs a lot of money, but since they're settled between lawyers it's probably not considered fraud since any settlement needs to admit that the injured party was in the right.

It's a huge business though since there are plenty of successful lawyers who have built their entire careers on helping Margaret throw herself down the stairs to feed her half dozen kids and growing. Food stamps are just sorta tied to Margaret because of the unique cultural baggage of the Reagan era and the preceding 1970's I guess, but her real job is slipping on wet floors and spilling window washer fluid on the ground to claim a hazardous environment caused her injury.

So basically, small and medium size enterprises, as usual, bear the burden of both supporting America's tax base and being victims to predatory insurance fraudsters, but fraudsters are less visible and thus harder to count while the government tells you basically exactly how much it spends a year on welfare. One thing known from the Clinton reforms is that it increased immediate familial income during an economic boom, but later it may have also increased the American underclass size, but this is still an extremely small portion of the overall population: at its peak the food stamps program had about 15% of the US population "on the dole" and at its summit it was about 5%, and the actual people and their circumstances are constantly shifting since you can only be on SNAP for a few months every few years, total.

So it's really difficult to say that Margaret's income is truly coming from food stamps (it helps, I guess, but is there even a "dry period" of personal injury suits?) and not simply being a professional at self-harm and public spectacle. OTOH, things like education and training in specific vocational fields can have real impacts (provided the people being put into these fields are compatible with the work, in which case see the HEXACO thing, where you match people's personalities with workers' to find their job, which is a fair sight better than asking people to do it themselves who usually only see what they want to be rather than what they are), but the USA counts this under welfare (it spends a very small amount of money proportionately on training than it does on Pell Grants and other useless nonsense) and arguably we could consider the entire public education system to be welfare in a sense.

But unconditional/conditional monetary support would work with UBI, albeit UBI would probably (in practice) want a income cutoff for the unconditional support. There's no reason a doctor, for example, needs an extra, say, $1,000/month stipend from the government unconditionally, unless he needs to hire someone to fix a shower or something due to mold infestation, in which case it can be filed by appraisal. OTOH Tamara Jones in Biloxi might want an extra $1,000/month to save back to move to Atlanta or something in the future. OTOH there isn't any simulation you can run that will show if Finnish women receiving $600 a month translates to African-American women receiving $1,000/month demogrants from the state of Mississippi will have anywhere near close enough the same net result, and it may even be detrimental to some states and beneficial for others (people leaving shitty states like Mississippi or Alabama to work in Georgia for ex.).

tl;dr UBI works to attack people who spend money frivolously which is not really what welfare recipients do at all. If they did they would be hobos who don't receive benefits at all, not in Section 8 or something working 80 hour weeks for a combined $12.50/hr including commutes between three jobs, and taking food stamps. People who spend money frivolously are idle rich or hipsters or something who never had to learn how to stretch a dollar. Or rather they have the brains of the idle rich: brains of mush, but idle rich are generally protected from falling by inheritance funds (usually) or trusts or something, whereas idle rich who are poor are just vagrants and people who live inside trash bags.

Margaret has a really steady job throwing herself down the stairs that keeps her family under an increasingly leaky roof and McDonald's on the table. Samantha has four really shitty jobs that pay basically nothing and require a thirty minute commute between them. Neither are going to be ousted by UBI, and one of them is the arch-welfare recipient, while the other is the person the welfare system is ostensibly designed for I guess. OTOH UBI might benefit the latter more provided its income in monetary value is equivalent or comparable: SNAP is limited and requires a lot of overhead to ensure it's being used according to the shopping list or whatever they give you, and it's not able to be ACH'ed to just any bank card you need a special sort of debit card that is linked to your personal account or something that gets refreshed during the few months you're allowed to use the stamps. So a UBI would simplify, if not eliminate, the overhead entirely. Just have it sent directly from the Fed's blockchain mines that produce the USD or whatever.

To really close the gap of bad welfare to good, you need to find ways to cut off parasites from free income. Like banning personal injury lawsuits or something outside of a class action suit. It won't stop people from ganging up on defenseless Ford Pintos but it will at least stop Margaret from terrorizing every franchise owner in the twin counties and escaping justice because she slept with the sheriff in high school or something and he's still not off the hook for the child support payments for another 18 months, and also Big Marts Ltd. has a mandatory settlement policy under $100k personal injury damages and Margaret has memorized the location of every camera in every gas station, general store, and Wal-Mart in a 50-mile radius.

e4: Or make it conditional on so many personal injury lawsuits filed and settled in the span of a decade.

e621: Or maybe bring back arranged marriage and get all these single mothers assigned a man or something. This would probably cut down on inceldom since most incels are just looking for companionship that family brings rather than prostitutes or whatever in a society obsessed with sex but averse to like, the actual finer points of marriage. Less aggro (or maybe early-stage) incels just have cuddle parties on Facebook where everyone spoons in their clothes.

That's assuming adoption/step-childhood has the same effect on males raising kids (reduction of aggro, colloquially "settling down") as biological children which it very well may not!

[Kyushima]

こんにちは！

I’m currently stuck on what to name Kyūshima’s legislative body, particularly something that translates well into Japanese. Kyūshima is a semi-constitutional monarchy, wherein the monarch is the true ruler of the state but has checks and balances. The legislature itself is representative, with every village or qualifying community having a seat or representative in the legislature. It proposes and discuss legislation and bills, but ultimately all the power of making something law resides with the monarch.

I was thinking "Royal Diet" or something of that nature, but I’m not at all sure.

[Taihei Tengoku]

The Diet has always been the Diet. The actual term is "国会" presently, which just means "National Society" or "帝國議会" before 1947, which translates to "Imperial Deliberation Society." Some variation of country-discuss-group characters should work for your country.

[Gallia-]

we live in a 会

code: cracked o:

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

全国人民代表大会。
<。>

[Triplebaconation]

Before the Diet there was the Genroin, or Chamber of Elders. This is the general Japanese term for senate.

[Radictistan]

I'd like to create a heavily subsidized, technologically backward semiconductor industry as part of an ill-conceived import substitution program. Are there any books useful for "designing" microprocessors that don't cost a bazillion dollars?

[Triplebaconation]

The O'Reilly Introduction to Microprocessors and Microcontrollers is 10 bucks for Kindle.

[Danternoust]

I'd like to create a heavily subsidized, technologically backward semiconductor industry as part of an ill-conceived import substitution program. Are there any books useful for "designing" microprocessors that don't cost a bazillion dollars?

import substitution begins with raw materials, not the final product

only then will you decide which is needed or not

[The Macabees]

If the intention is for an "ill-conceived" ISI program, then it begins with the final product and not raw materials.

One of the reasons several ISI programs failed in S. America was exactly because they started with the final product, and therefore did not have the capital structure to produce this output (like tractors) efficiently without reducing supply and raising prices.

[Danternoust]

If the intention is for an "ill-conceived" ISI program, then it begins with the final product and not raw materials.

One of the reasons several ISI programs failed in S. America was exactly because they started with the final product, and therefore did not have the capital structure to produce this output (like tractors) efficiently without reducing supply and raising prices.

You mean trained personnel and non-corrupt management?

[The Macabees]

And the supply chain. Not just raw materials, but manufactured components.

[Gallan Systems]

I'd like to create a heavily subsidized, technologically backward semiconductor industry as part of an ill-conceived import substitution program. Are there any books useful for "designing" microprocessors that don't cost a bazillion dollars?

How to fail at ISI: Be small.

If you're big enough it'll work. Big enough means like, Benelux sized.

Short of going something like full gallium-arsenide in the 1970s and never looking back, there's not a lot you can do to fuck up a semiconductor industry that works properly with adequate clean rooms, wafer production, and packaging. Relatively small countries, like Korea and Formosa, were able to do it in the 1980s with little foreign assistance. The biggest issue is growing large enough crystals with few enough defects to produce viable wafers and then after that probably production of laser tooling or something needed to produce the chips.

You can of course have a "shitty" semiconductor industry that is crummy at crystal growth because it uses something stupid like gallium or germanium which is hard to work with, but in practice all this means is that you'll have a lot of blotter marks due to microscopic defects, fractures, and failures on the wafers destroying the chips. Once you have the crystal growth down everything else sort of falls into place, as even crummy uarchs can be made to work, and at worst you can always just copy a competitor's uarch like the Bulgarians did.

Since it's very easy to produce bad wafer crystals by using too many impurities that ruin their properties or just being bad at growing them to produce defects in their structures, it's probably harder to fail at any point in the chain. Historically I think the bulk of failed semiconductor industries in the USSR and the like were due to them 1) not using silicon as the medium but rather something else (loads of shit was tried in the 70s, it was wild, but semiconductor manufacturing is mostly solved now); 2) poor crystal growth resulting in small, bad, or just unreliable replication of crystals that translates to dead chips on the assembly line; 3) Comecon was being checked by Cocom export controls and couldn't acquire the necessary fabricator technology from China or Japan anymore.

The third one is tenuous since they managed to still acquire powerful machine tools like laser cutters, drydocks, and CNC mills without much issue, though. OTOH this also put them in thrall to the Japanese and European industries, whereas if they had a practical and functional semiconductor industry, they would be able to do their own stuff, so there's that.

The ability of the USSR to keep pace with Western semiconductor industries through the early 1980s or late '70s is probably entirely because they were keeping pace with crystal growth capacity until then and hit a stumbling block in growing large enough crystals to produce chips fast enough, either because they couldn't afford the aircraft carrier sized investments in a major fab, or because they simply couldn't make wafers big enough because their crystals were too small and bad. They were really good are image intensifier tubes, so it's somewhat perplexing, since the technologies are fairly similar, it's just that the actual production processes are wildly different.

Bulgaria, conversely, managed to keep pace and still had a pretty decent presence even in the 1990s, but its fabs never graduated into the 6" realm. You can also just ignore computers entirely and make only a few 4-6" fabs to produce mainframes of suitable capacity for specialist agencies. This would actually be the smart move, as personal computers probably killed productivity, and no one has ever done more with e-mail than they could with an office inbox.

Throw up some trade barriers to keep Intels and AMDs out without substantial technological gifts, and hope you have a large market to attract them. Don't forget the airplanes to bomb anyone who tries to Opium War you.

[Danternoust]

Intels and AMDs

Actually it is only AMD now.

Galla, go and post your stuff to a blog, much knowledge, much amaze.

[Radictistan]

By "technologically backward" I was really just thinking several process nodes behind, like the Russians are now with the Elbrus line.

The O'Reilly Introduction to Microprocessors and Microcontrollers is 10 bucks for Kindle.

Thanks for the recommendation.

[Gallan Systems]

Buy one foundry in the late 1970s.

Operate until the early 2000s.

Never touch it again.

Done.

[Austrasien]

Semiconductors are fragile devices so it's not super surprising the USSR struggled with them even if the specific reasons are a bit obscure. A significant downside of a totalitarian system is excessive criticism of anything except other individuals can be and probably will be interpreted as a criticism of the system itself, especially by those who are also seeking to advance themselves in the system at your expense. And this left things like bad practices in factories and planning persistently unaddressed or subject to wild gyrations when they attracted the attention of those few who were politically powerful enough to impose their preferences on the system.

ISI projects also run afoul the same problems on a smaller scale. More often than they succeed they become politically unimpeachable and soon weighed down by rent-seekers internally and externally while producing little more than poor-quality imitations of foreign products.

Which also describes the vast majority of Soviet enterprises pretty neatly.

[Gallan Systems]

tfw the bottoms of your teacups fall out when you pour the tea in them

e: anyway it's probably more accurate to say that any system will inevitable degenerate into nepotism without constant refreshment or huge laws; somehow the USA went from Saturn V NASA Moon Men being on track to have SpaceX-type launch costs by 1970 to uhhh NASA/ULA being a Congressional jobs program whose purpose is to increase cost as much as possible.

SpaceX just shows up in the oughties and poaches all the good engineers from ULA/NASA and starts pumping out a National Launch System equivalent i guess

which is another strange thing considering SpaceX is run more like Rock Island Arsenal, which is GUBMINT, than Lockheed-Martin, which is PRIVAHT INDUSTREE

e2: clearly tho the best solution is generally going to be free trade since this will allow the greatest penetration of consumerist markets and mindsets to a post-industrial population

[Austrasien]

e2: clearly tho the best solution is generally going to be free trade since this will allow the greatest penetration of consumerist markets and mindsets to a post-industrial population

What if we free traded...

...with ourselves

[Danternoust]

http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/

EDIT: see update at the bottom, the transistor gate length has been reduced to <5µm (1975 tech. level) which brings an increase in device performance.

Huh. Galla is right.

[Gallan Systems]

e2: clearly tho the best solution is generally going to be free trade since this will allow the greatest penetration of consumerist markets and mindsets to a post-industrial population

What if we free traded...

...with ourselves

Were Soviet internal passports even a severe restriction on internal trade?

If so, thanks, Stalin. Not only did you reintroduce Ohkrana and the Katorga, but you also brought back Tsarist internal passports.

The Caucasus is not sending their best. ):

If not, it's still true, but I guess it's just a fancy driver's license.