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There's a big hurdle for the US manufacturing sector in that many products are much cheaper to produce in China or Taiwan. Part of the reason for this is that those countries have much less strict standards on things like pay, employee working conditions and pollution controls. Another way of looking at it is that US companies are saving money and skirting important social and environmental rules by outsourcing their manufacturing to countries which don't have these rules - with excellent consequences in terms of increased profits and cheaper products, but disastrous consequences in terms of the environment, the welfare of those who make the products, and US manufacturing jobs.

It seems to me that the US government should use its power to tax imports to level the playing field for US manufacturers by removing the incentive to manufacture elsewhere. In other words, the import tax on something should be the difference between what it costs to make something in the US and what it actually cost to make due to laxer regulations. Then, manufacturing for things sold in the US would (over time) move to the optimal locations based on where they were being sold and the where the raw materials were mined or recycled.

Suddenly making all our electronics more expensive by (maybe) a factor of 10 would be enormously disruptive so I suggest ramping up the tax gradually over a period of (say) 10 years or so. That would lessen the blow and give the US manufacturing companies some time to bootstrap. It also gives a great incentive to China to improve working conditions and emissions since doing so essentially wouldn't cost them anything (it would be covered by the corresponding reductions in import taxes).

In the long term, I would expect that the final cost of the manufactured products in question would stay about the same or even become cheaper than what they would be without these taxes. That's because as it becomes more expensive to hire people to do a menial job, it becomes more cost-effective to automate that job. The machine costs more to begin with (you need clever people to build and program it) but once it's up and running the unit cost per produced item is much lower.

There's a lot more to it than that, of course - China still has a big advantage in the expertise it has developed in building things, China sells to other places besides the US, and there are currency, debt, and trade treaty issues which further complicate matters in ways I don't completely understand. Still, I think it's an interesting idea to consider.

One of the most inefficient things we do with energy is heat up water with it only to let most of that water (and most of the energy) go right down the drain when we take showers (baths are a little better because more of the energy goes into heating the house in the winter, but they do use more water).

So I think that if we were serious about wanting to save energy one thing we could do is try to encourage shorter showers by making people aware of how much energy they use. What I imagine is a little display that shows you how much energy you've used since the start of your shower (if you like you could factor in the cost of the water and sewage as well as the energy used to heat the water). For maximum effectiveness, I think the value displayed by the meter should be in units of local currency, and correspond to the amount you'd spend taking a shower of that length every day for a year - that way it feels like you're spending money really fast (of course, you'd really only be spending it at 1/365th of that rate so it's a bit of a psychological hack/cheat).

I think many people would appreciate such a device for the money it would save them, though I suppose some people might believe that long, guilt-free showers are worth that extra money.

I've said before that I would prefer to replace the minimum wage with a guaranteed minimum income, but I've since thought of a justification for keeping the minimum wage.

In any economy, there are commodities - things which are easily available and the prices of which are easy to discover such as gold, oil or milk. One very important commodity is the hourly labour of a human who is healthy and competent at following simple instructions but otherwise unskilled. Even without a minimum wage law, there will be a natural price for such labour. It will fluctuate with time and space but will generally stay within a certain range. In some times and places it might actually go higher than the legislated minimum wage (which corresponds to a state of zero unemployment).

Having a legislated minimum wage has the effect of setting a scale factor (or a "gauge", for the physicists) of the economy as a whole - it's sort of like having an electrical circuit that isn't connected to anything and then connecting one part of it to ground. If the minimum wage is set too high then it will cause an inflationary pressure which will dissipate once everyone has a job again. If it's set too low then it will have a negligible effect anyway, since there would be very few people who would be unable to get a job for more than minimum wage. According to this theory, the minimum wage has nothing to do with making sure the poorest members of society are paid a respectable wage (which makes sense since a minimum wage is actually a regressive policy) - it's just an economic control factor.

Now, as an economic control factor, a minimum wage has a number of problems. One is that it takes a while for the inflation to eliminate unemployment after the market rate for labour goes down, so there's always some residual unemployment. Another is that people are not all equal - the labour of some people is just naturally below the basic labour rate (because they are unskilled and also either unhealthy or incompetent). While this is unfortunate, essentially forbidding them from working at all (by preventing employers from hiring them at the market rate) seems to add insult to injury (not to mention creating yet another dreaded poverty trap). A third problem is that there are many other ways that governments "ground" economies - in the electrical circuit analogy they're connecting various bits of a circuit to voltage sources that correspond to "what we think this ought to be" rather than what it actually is, which seems like a good way to get short circuits.

Sometimes I think it would make things simpler if, when I logged onto my bank's website, there were two sorts of transactions listed. One would the normal sort: "x dollars paid to y on date z". The other sort would be "x dollars per month paid to y since date z". For example, my monthly mortgage payment would be listed as a single transaction, not a separate one each month.

Certain calculations are much easier when done with time derivative values. For example, interest on my mortgage accumulates daily but the payments are monthly, so to figure out what is actually owed at any time requires a lengthy spreadsheet or complicated program. If the interest accumulated continuously, and the payment also happened continuously, the calculations would be much simpler.

Normally, interest is specified as a percentage by which a debt grows. But to know what that really means, you have to specify how long it takes to grow by that much - this can lead to confusion (deliberate or accidental). It would be much better if interest was specified as a growth constant (with standard units of Hz, bizarrely enough), such that if you have a debt at time 0 and changes only because of interest (no payments or fees) then after time the debt will have grown to . If you are also making payments at the rate of per unit time, then the debt is given by the differential equation which has the solution

Hence one can easily solve for the time it takes to repay the loan:

Or you can solve for the repayment rate if you want to repay the loan in a specific amount of time:

Similarly, one can do calculations around retirement savings. Suppose you have in retirement savings today and the inflation growth constant is . If you are saving at a rate of and investing in something with a growth rate of , and you want to retire when you can maintain an income of .

The amount you need in savings at retirement is in:

Plugging this into the equation for the savings rate while working:

Gives:

Solving for retirement time:

Or savings rate:

Of course, all that assumes you can get a fixed rate of return and that inflation stays constant. In reality, these variables are constantly changing. There's also the matter of risk to consider - trading off means for variances, but you get the idea.

The current inflation rate is about 300 picoHertz. The highest recorded hyperinflation is about 6000000 picoHertz (6 microHertz).

How should payment rates be specified in user interfaces? "Dollars per month" is probably the most meaningful multiplier - to make it consistent we should use a standard average month length of 2629746 seconds. Current balance would be updated continuously supposing that the paying of salary and recurring bills could also be paid continuously. One would want to take care to set limits on the payment rate for bills (just as one does with direct debits) so that a mistake at the gas company doesn't instantly wipe out your savings.

Further derivatives could be taken into account so that one could pay exponentially increasing bills like the retirement savings above without making any adjustments. The ultimate outcome of this would be to link everything to inflation and display/specify amounts in "year 2000 dollars" (for example) - in other words, the Inflation-linked currency I've written about before.

Another political idea I really like is that of electronic liquid democracy. The idea is this - instead of trying to choose which of a very small number of representatives will best represent your interests, you can instead vote directly on every measure that your representative would vote on.

Most of the time, you might not care or might not have enough background knowledge to know what's best, so you appoint a proxy to choose your vote on your behalf. You can even choose different proxies for different areas - one for health-related legislation, another for trade-related and so on. You can choose multiple ranked proxies so that if one proxy fails to vote on one issue, the vote will go to your second choice and so on. Proxies can also delegate to other proxies. All this is done electronically (with appropriate security safeguards to avoid elections getting hacked) so you can change your proxies and votes whenever you like.

It's somewhat surprising to me that this hasn't taken off already, given how often voters seem to be dissatisfied with the decisions of their elected representatives. It seems like it would be relatively easy to get going - somebody just needs to run on a platform of no policy except voting in accordance with the result of the system. Such a representative could get votes from both sides of the political spectrum and grants voters much more power and control - it seems to be the best of all worlds. Unfortunately when it was tried in Australia, the Senator On-Line failed miserably to get elected. There are several reasons why this might have happened:

• People avoiding voting for a candidate they feel is unlikely to win in order to avoid the wrong mainstream candidate getting elected.
• People not trusting this newfangled internet stuff.

The second problem should go away as the generations that haven't grown up in the internet age die out. The first problem is ever present for third parties in first-past-the-post systems. Given that politicians won't generally reform the systems that elected them, it seems like the only chances are for the third parties to sneak in at times when a majority of people have an unpopular view of both mainstream parties (which may happen more often as internet-savvy voters get better informed about what their representatives are actually doing).

I find the idea of Seasteading fascinating - it could certainly be a great thing for humanity if it accelerates the evolution of government systems and gets them to solve the Hotelling's law problem and the irrational voter problem . However, I have serious doubts that a seastead would be a good place to live in the long term. Assuming it gets off the ground, here is how I think the experiment would play out.

The first problem is that seastead "land" is extremely expensive - hundreds of dollars per square foot, on par with living space in a major US city but (initially) without the network effects that make US cities valuable places to live/work/do stuff. The "land" also has ongoing maintainance costs much greater than old-fashioned land - making sure it stays afloat, de-barnacling, ensuring a supply of fresh water and food, removing waste and so on.

This means that (at least initially) a seastead is going to be importing much more than it exports. In order to be practical, it's going to have to ramp up to being a net exporter as quickly as possible to pay back the initial costs, keep itself running and generate net wealth. But there are far fewer options for a seastead to make money than for a landstead. Farming is going to be particularly difficult as it requires a lot of space. So the seasteads will have to concentrate on producing wealth in ways that don't require a lot of space, and trade with land states for food.

The things which seasteads will be able to do cheaper than landsteads are things which are made more expensive by government interference, such as manufacturing (no government to impose a minimum wage or environmentally friendly disposal practices) software and other IP-intensive activities (no copyrights or patents to worry about) and scientific research (particularly biological - no ethics laws to get in the way). Drugs, prostitution and gambling will be common as sin taxes can be avoided. Seasteads which don't do these things just won't be able to compete with the land states, so by a simple survival-of-the-fittest process, this is what the successful seasteads will end up doing - a classic race to the bottom.

By design, it's supposed to be very easy to leave a seastead and join another if you disagree with how your current seastead is being run - you just pack up your house onto a ship and go to another seastead. But this very mobility will introduce its own set of problems. Crime, for example - if someone commits a serious crime aboard a seastead, there's little stopping them from leaving before the police start breathing down their necks. To avoid having a serious crime problem, the seasteads are going to have to sacrifice freedom for security in one of a number of ways:

• Make it more difficult to move (you'll need a check to make sure you aren't under suspicion of a crime before you'll be allowed to get on the boat).
• Have a justice system and uniform baseline of laws covering a large union of seasteads - allow free travel between these seasteads but you'll still be under the same criminal jurisdiction - similar to how US states operate. By agreeing to be a part of the union, your seastead gets some additional security but you have to play by the union's rules to keep your police protection.

Another problem is that it's going to be difficult to institute any form of social welfare - if you tax the rich to feed the poor, those who are getting a net tax will just leave for a seastead which doesn't do that. So there is likely to be a great poverty problem - a big divide between wealthy seastates and poor ones. The poor ones will just die out and their "land" will be taken over by other seasteads, accelerating the Darwinism to the delight of libertarians and the dismay of humanitarians.

If lots of people end up on seasteads, I forsee large environmental problems since it's going to be very difficult for seasteads to enact (let alone enforce) anti-pollution laws. Seasteads which take pains to avoid dumping their toxic waste in the ocean just won't be able to compete with those that don't.

There are certain economies of scale in many of the wealth-generating activities that seasteads will perform, so it seems likely that reasonably successful seasteads will merge into larger conglomerates the way corporations do in the western world (particularly in the US). These corporate sea-states will be the ones which are nicest to live on - since they are major producers of wealth they'll be able to afford the best living conditions and attract the brightest and hardest-working people. They won't be the most free seasteads though - only those who can (or have) contributed to the seastead's economy will be allowed to live there - customers, employees and their families, retired employees, employees of partner corporations and so on. As an employee, you'll have to play by the company rules and not engage in any activities which might be deleterious to the company's profit margin - don't expect to be able to take recreational drugs, for example - they might affect your job performance and add costs to the company healthcare plan.

Some seasteads might have constitutions which prevent this sort of thing. They might not be as big, as pleasant to live on or quite as good at making money, but their small size and consequent agility might allow them to survive and become viable in certain niche areas of the seasteading economy. They may have to make some compromises to stay viable, but as different seasteads will make different compromises, there will be plenty of choice.

The outcome of the seasteading experiment is really important because when humankind inevitably starts colonizing space, similar economic forces will be at work.