70-20-10 rule for Earth Use

Currently, humans see the earth as entirely a resource created for humans, a set of resources we can use to our hearts content. It is only recently that we have begun to realize that we can overexploit to our detriment. So, any cutbacks we make will have been motivated by the fact that if we don't, humans in general will lose. I propose something a little more drastic. As humans, we can say 20% of the resources on earth belong to us, completely ours, 10% are shared resources with animals, and 70% are dedicated completely to non-human use (this would not be hard to do at all given just how much energy is being expended and consumed by non-humans. However, given the US's incredible agricultural coverage as well as suburban sprawl, land acreage would probably be better off divided 70% human, 20% shared, 10% completely non-human. That is 70% for agriculture and cities, 20% for parks and recreation, 10% non-human natural reserves. Obviously each category of land would be selected to optimize resources; agriculture would select for plains (with wildlife corridors running through), parks and rec would select for mountains, deserts, and coast, and non-human areas would be selected so as to maximize biodiversity and provide for a strong gene pool and population reserviour for the parks and rec areas.

Actually, the 70-20-10ness of this is really irrelevant, I think that what's more important is for us to set a goal as a society of how much consumption of resources and land is both equitable and most utilitarian in terms of long and short-term costs and benefits. Once we set a goal, then we can start setting aside resources and begin the recovery process.

*Google has an 70-20-10 rule (70% of resources go to the core business (search, adwords, adsense) 20% of resources go to related projects (book search, blog search, scholar, local) and 10% go to oddball experiments that don't necessarily provide any foreseeable revenue (picasa, earth, talk).

Voluntary sexual training et al

We may benefit, as a society from making the choice to provide for some method of voluntary sexual training that is not taboo rather than to relegate the learning of sex to experimentation by children and adolescents.
Also,
Why do we relegate the work of parenting, food preparation, and construction to the least educated and experienced? These are important jobs that require trust.
I guess we do so because we value cheap housing over quality housing. I guess I just don't think that buying crappy housing and food is any better of a long-term investment than selecting for poor parents to bear the brunt of parenting in our society.

Voting is so... 3 centuries ago

In a "representative democracy" we choose people we trust in our stead to make our decisions since we either would make worse decisions or because we have other concerns. Voting is a very simplistic system, which worked in a simpler society but I think our idea of expressing our needs and wants of government could use some modification.
I propose a more fluid "trust system". Each person is allotted 150 "slots" for people they know best (based on the assumption 150 is the optimal human community size from "Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language" by Dunbar). They may choose or not choose to fill these however often they want. What person A says about person B will only be counted if both person A and person B have each other on their respective lists, otherwise, the data will be ignored (this is to make sure that people can only assign trust to people they actually know).
Finally, each person is given 10 "trust points" which they can assign in any manner among the (up to) 150 people on their list. This would lead to a maximum of 1500 trust points possibly assigned to one person.
But not all points are created equal. That is, a point from someone with 10 trust points will be worth more than a trust point from someone with none. Also, trust points would provide less and less value as they permeate through the degrees of separation*. Further, person A's trust points assigned to others who trust person A would be discounted when calculating person A's reputation to prevent circles of trust that do not integrate into the broader context (see search engine spam).
This system would work elegantly and could be understood by anyone with a high-school education from the last 15 years (of course, high school education would subsequently be designed with this in mind). For those who cannot understand logarithms or exponential functions, there would be a transitional government pamphlet that would explain it. The more important issue is that it would greatly simplify things for people. All we have to do is:
1. Type/write the full names of some people you know well (150 max).
2. You have ten points, assign them in any way you like among the people on your list, remember, by assigning these points you are voting for people who you think are better suited to make government decisions than you. If you do not think anyone else is better suited, simply assign the points to yourself, or don't assign them at all. Come back as often as you like to change your list or point assignments or even delete your list if you choose.

Results will be tabulated nightly.

In addition, there would be different categories of trust points. For example person A might trust person B to make environmental decisions but not budget decisions and so for each category of decision making deemed useful, a person could assign 10 trust points from each category in addition to the general trust points. And finally, rather than the categories of decision making being enforced from the top down (ie categories of municipal representatives, members of the cabinet), the importance of categories of decision making would be voted on simply through the assigning of points because you can decide on your own what category of trust you would like to assign someone trust points under, including a category that you make up, as long as you have fewer than 11 categories.

*this could be done by a logarithmic scale, or an exponential scale:
[number of points assigned directly to person A]*1^0+[number of points assigned to person A's point assigners excluding person A's points]*1^-1+[number of points assigned to person A's point assigner's point assigner's, excluding person A's points and person A's point assigner's points]*1^-2... etc

dolphin musher

In the future when fossil fuel resources are scarce we are going to need to find ecologically sustainable ways to do the things we've gotten used to doing as well as adjusting what we do to reflect ecological restrictions (or ecological realities if you want to think about it that way). There are many ways we can do this. For example, artificial technology is both exhaustive of resources we have very little of and not as good at the job as an organic solution would be. Brains can be fed sugars, proteins, and nutrients (quite renewable and perhaps even organicly derived and sustainably made). So, take the brains of many "simple" animals and use them to do simple calculations. Error checking and redundancy will be a cost of this system.
I was also thinking, maybe we could have dolphins drag around our boats. But... maybe that's not such a good idea.

I've found that if I imagine these 3 phrases being said in my head, I can motivate myself:

"Welcome to Google. Can you start tomorrow?" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-i-got-to-google-ch-2-tale-of-t.html

"DO IT NOW!" http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/do-it-now.htm

"I love you."

Collateral Damage: Problem and Solution

Imagine a war in which no civilian died. Imagine a war in which only soldiers who had agreed to fight and die for their country fought and died for their country and that innocent bystanders did not fear war any more than they feared a judicious police officer. Such a system would be a vast improvement over ours and would in fact be the ideal system for war to take place. As the ideal it is something we should (all other things held constant) be approaching. Under such a system, war's only cost would be the lives of soldiers who had agreed to lay down their lives and the costs of equipment and ammunition.
Any war or invasion has a purpose. Assuming that purpose is a noble one (such as liberation) it can be likened to flossing. A region that has been under dictatorial control to the detriment of the dictator's subjects will find it has festering problems that may or may not be solved from the inside. When a liberating invasion occurs, the liberating force (or the force that ordered them) purports to believe that an outside force can be an aid, can accelerate the process of liberation, can minimize human suffering, or can cause to occur a liberation that would have never taken place otherwise.
Any military invasion is bound to create collateral damage. In recent wars collateral damage has been a great cost. To illustrate, current estimates of coalition deaths are about 2 000 (http://icasualties.org/oif/) whereas estimates of civilian deaths are about 30 000 (http://iraqbodycount.org/)--some even as high as 100 000 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html). These figures don't take into account civilian dismemberment, disability, loss of family members, loss of livelihood, or ay of many more costs of invasion and war. The idea behind a noble war is that such costs would be outweighed by the benefits to all afterward from long-term peace (thus overall less likelyhood of involuntarily getting killed, dismembered, disabled, or losing family from war) and increased freedom (and thus overall less likelyhood of getting killed, dismembered, disabled, losing family members, or losing livelihood from an oppressive government). However, as rational beings we must constantly strive to make strides in minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. Just as the military rewards research into faster tanks, more powerful ammunition, and cheaper equipment, the DoD has an obligation to maximize the unquantitative benefits and minimize the unquantitative costs of war.
In the long-term the damaging costs of war are partly mitigated by a rebuilding of the country being invaded however, in the very short-term during and after the invasion there are medical emergencies that the military has not been assigned nor does it have the resources to accommodate. As a person on either side of the conflict it is my hope that such medical emergencies be accommodated (imagine if your country was oppressive and was being liberated and your arm was blown off, don't you wish the invading force would help you out rather than let you die on the side of the road?).
The most direct way of doing this IMHO is to take into account the cost of civilian casualties in any operation. A simple way of doing this is by calculating the provision of cost of medical care to wounded civilians as if they were domestic soldiers or citizens.
The outcome of this would be that along with any combative invasion force would have to come an emergency medical force capable of salvaging as many lives as possible. A well-supplied and combat-equiped medic corps would follow and accompany the front-line handing off the medical services to a fully-funded red-cross as the front-line moves.