Government gave doctors earning $200k up to $44k for iPads costing $500. Took taxes from staff making $25/hour who then lost jobs to the technology.
Think by Numbers runs cost-benefit analyses for a species that spends $604 on weapons for every $1 on clinical trials. We suspect a math error.
Posts, Ranked by Extinction-Prevention Potential
You cannot prove you won't suffer forever. You cannot prove you won't be pleasant forever. Both probabilities are greater than zero, both outcomes are infinite, and the cost of nudging the odds is one share of a military contractor. When the stakes are infinite, any finite action is rational. It is Pascal's Wager with the bugs fixed.
You grow a whole suffering animal to extract a few molecules you could brew directly. The optimized civilization deletes the animal, keeps the molecule, and gets most of the planet back.
The Optimitron comes free with your first government. Its Optimal Budget Generator (OBG) and Optimal Policy Generator (OPG) check which policies work by looking at the 10,000 places that already tried them. Your species skipped this step and went straight to arguing.
Put money in a pool. Recruit people to vote on the 1% Treaty. If humanity gets healthier and richer by 2040, Earth Optimization Points holders split the pool. If not, depositors get their money back (at 9.03x what they put in).
Oxford spent $500 per patient, saved a million lives in 100 days, and the whole trial cost less than a single F-35 fighter jet. America spends $41,000 per patient. This is the proof that your species already knows how to do this.
Obama budget $3.80 trillion vs Romney $3.79 trillion. 0.26% difference. Same banks fund both. Democracy is working perfectly wrong.
Americans spend $60 billion on weight loss while ending world hunger costs $30 billion. One group pays to subtract calories, the other needs calories.
A diagnostic survey of the systems that allocate your species' resources to killing instead of curing
Representative democracy suffers from an inescapable principal-agent problem where elected officials' incentives diverge from citizen welfare. Wishocracy introduces RAPPA (Randomized Aggregated Pairwise Preference Allocation), which aggregates citizen preferences through cognitively tractable pairwise comparisons and creates accountability via Citizen Alignment Scores that channel electoral resources toward politicians who actually represent what citizens want.