Thoughts at Random

The main idea: having sons to be subject to a transferable permit system.   0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 05.07.2023, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  1 The Audience 1.1 There are those who lay the blame for much of what is wrong in this world at the feet of men. 1.2 There are those who find much fault with the excess of power women may wield over men nowadays. 1.3 There are those who worry seriously about overpopulation. 1.4 There are those who agonise over the dysgenic tendencies of the modern world. 1.5 There are those who think a population is only as large as the number of fertile-age women it has. 1.6 There are those who think every achievement worth mentioning can only be expected from men.  1.7 There are those who’d applaud every scheme by which those better off are made to pay those less fortunate. 1.8 There are those who ...

 0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This post is a catch-all repository of miscellaneous lesser ideas that would otherwise clog the bottom of my preferences, with additions coming up all the time and each new leading number indicating a separate entry.   1.1 ( 20220630 ) What is the optimal amount of policing? Here’s a simple, reasonably realistic and entirely obvious model that is relevant to the question: the more freedom of action and freedom from scrutiny the police have, the more they are able to keep visible crime under control. The more controls are applied, the less are they able to keep criminals in check. On the other hand, higher freedom of action causes increasing abuses of power and allows police forces to act like gangs writ large which, unlike honest gangs, can hide behind the cover of the state. 1.2 In this model, the optimal amount of freedom and resources allowed to the policing effort is such as to allow the ...

0. This entry was originally posted on 22.01.2025, and retracted on 8.3.2025, though I still leave these up. The issue with the first design is that hash difficulty is exponential to the number of leading zeroes, so scoring chains by total count of leading zeroes would simply incentivize one-zero hashes. You can rescue this by scoring a chain as the sum of exp(K) over all blocks, with k being each block's count of leading zeroes for a hopefully time-neutral score. But then we're simply tracking the hashing time invested in any chain, so roughly the same (without controlling for computing power) as the VDF count system, at which point the critical issue with both designs emerges: they offer no protection again deep reorganizations. Nothing would stop a miner from accumulating VDF cycles on a stale block and potentially have this chain become equal to or even surpass the main one in terms of total cycles, at a catastrophic loss of information. Indeed, whoever runs their machine c...