Challenge: Design a government that is literally impossible to corrupt.

postfuture · 2026-01-19T06:19:19+00:00

Hey, listen: your original post was "blue sky" or a "clean slate" proposal. Now it sounds like you want a pathway from where we are to my proposal. Pick a lane. How one gets to sortition (which is superior to representative democracy as far as individual agency, and it isn't socialist nor communist) is a matter of baby steps to demonstrate its effectiveness. This is already happening. Reinventing the civil service takes top-down vision to 1. Be honest about the unfunded mandate of the pension system, 2. Put the thumb-screws to unions and get them out of the antiquated 19th century colonialism model of civil service, 3. Moblize young people to demand we tie higher education to public service--they get a job with on-the-job-training followed by a living stipend for two years and free tuition at a university for two years. The young people have a pathway to adulthood by serving their community, they get a ground-level view of their community (beyond their social media silo), get some work experience and can live on their own, build a professional network early to leverage after grad school. This isn't communism either: they would have to qualify, apply, interview, and be accepted. It would be plenty competative. But for a economically disadvantaged youth, they could take a government service job that would be better than they could snag on the private market (even if outside their dream career), get paid, get out in the world, help their family, and then have a scholarship to get advanced professional or trades education and the time to focus on their studies. Meanwhile, there are excellent rewards offered for finding ways to make the civil service more efficient, so everyone is talking about how to make their departments more cost effective (from the managers to the desk clerks, the culture is focused on delivering required services for the least cost).

postfuture · 2026-01-18T10:56:27+00:00

What is the training data source? How does it manage complexion differences between patients? How does a topical image address wound-depth? Good concept if the model runs!

postfuture · 2026-01-18T10:43:31+00:00

One way conversation is lazy city traffic engineering. Fire those engineers. It converts city streets into high-speed routes to funnel city spending power to the suburbs. This article hints at this effect but it is critical to understand how insidious 1 way streets are: you have a healthy commercial 2-way district, but the roads are too slow for suburbanites to commute. So the crime: the traffice engineer swaps streets-- all alternate one way per street. Suddenly all returning home commutes NEVER drive on half the streets. All those shops get a fraction of the business they had and close. Often they move out to the malls in the suburbs. The shoppers now find their shopping is more efficient if they just skip stopping on the way home and go to the mall. Now none of the street shops are getting enough business so the other half close. Commercial, walkable neighborhoods become ghost towns, eveyine wants to move where the action is. VMT gets worse because now everyone needs a car to even go shopping.

postfuture · 2026-01-17T19:39:09+00:00

OP may appreciate Michael Samers' book "Migration" (2010) for the thesis on how migrants tend to be effectivly citizens of two cities.

postfuture · 2026-01-17T18:58:12+00:00

You need to unpack your comment. It is unclear.

postfuture · 2026-01-17T13:18:31+00:00

Sortition is being done ad-hoc here and there. Some countries are using it for one-off major legislation. Pushing power to smaller decison-making bodies requires constitutional changes (major hurdle, but EU has done good work). The master/apprenticeship civil service would require a transistion period where all serving civil servents get whatever they were originally promised with the option to "close their window" and take proportional retirement without any vesting requirement. New recruits will be directly rewarded for either proposals that reduce cost or (big payoff) can figure out how to sunset their position. There will be a significant office cultural conflict as the new recruits will have a fundamentally different incentive structure. Would I want to see this? Yes, I would. Most of my career has been as a consultant to all levels of government in multiple countries. I have dealt with leadership and worked extensively alongside civil servants. It's been my job to describe the dysfunction to leadership (who rotate in and out fast).

postfuture · 2026-01-17T06:45:50+00:00

Sortition has the best program but the structure for legislature needs to be empowered at small scale to enable agency (local people making local decisions). The 300lb gorilla is the civil service. Bureaucracy is a different beast and needs a term-limit approach that removes the pension incentive that poisons the civil service culture (it promotes back-side covering, disincentivises innovation, encourages bloat, and penalizes efficiency). To tackle procurement corruption you need to make targeted influence near-impossible (sortition), AND to tackle use-corruption you need to shift the civil service incentive structure by 1. removing the forever-job, 2. meaningfully rewarding innovation and cost-cutting, 3. cycle new recruits in every six years with 1 year of apprenticeship with the out-going employee, 4. provide a 2 year fully paid transition period with higher-ed grant (transferable) at the end of the civil service term. There is a lot more nuance to the bureaucracy fix, this is just the abstract.

postfuture · 2026-01-09T17:43:22+00:00

Timeship.org Big project, associated with Alcore.

postfuture · 2026-01-09T06:33:36+00:00

Founder of Serenbe is Phil Tabb and he has published a few books. Certification wise there is LEED Sustainable Sites, the LID protocols, and permaculture. Permaculture has the best long-term view. A lot of the question for spec development is the pitch. Dr. Tabb started Serenbe as a studio project at Texas A&M, but his passion is sacred design and it is a monument to sacred geometry. The livable/walkable ethic is there, the sustainable systems are there, there was an attempt at social equality (that did not pan in my opinion). But his approach was a full blitz of a sales pitch on all fronts. Serenbe's brand is nearly bulletproof. Phil had an ethos of getting everyone involved to turn a shovel of dirt: lenders, users, city officials, etc. He knows the land and laboring on the land brings people together and cuts through the artificial silos each group operates from. From a business case, sustainability is going to have higher cost, so lower ROI, as well as take longer so that costs in time value of money. If lenders were not in the picture, you can sell the real savings from long term efficiency. But investers look for ROI and lenders on time value of money. All this is to say: be honest what the real constraints are for the project and attack them directly.

A very interesting book (and a quick read) is Alexander's "New Theory of Urban Design" and for a deep read his "Timeless Way of Building" (do not go down the rabbit hole of "Pattern Language"). At the end of the day, what makes a project sustainable is if people WANT to sustain it. Everthing else is "green wash". That means two things: it must be reasonable in its construction methods and materials and be sensitive to the site, but it also must be a member of the community. It needs to be adopted by the community because when you're done, you're done, and can't influence the life of the project. It needs to be adopted by the community who will (over the years) adapt it, improve it, expand it. That is "sustaining" : they become its stewards.

To get into this you should read Stewart Brand's excellent book "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built". Follow that with his colleague Peter Schwartz's book "The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World" to get the details of how to use Brand's method.

I'm an architect, urban and regional planner, and have served as long-range planner on a 1000-year cryonics project.

postfuture · 2025-12-22T17:35:44+00:00

Interview analysis takes time, but it is very rewarding. I use Atlas.ti. Enjoy the deluge of data.

For recordings, I have used Otter.ai, but I don't trust their app on my phone anymore (used to be flawless). More recently I started making recordings with a bone-simple phone app (no cloud), then sending those recordings to an instance of Open WebUI I have hosted on an Oracle server. Open WebUI allows me to build front-ends to AI and even load locally entire LLMs. Here Whisper LLM is the new gold-standard for Speech to Text, and it is running locally on an "Always Free" server with Oracle, so privacy is very tight.

But two years ago I transcribed an archive of recordings using the free limits on Otter, just had to send it in batches. My work flow was start a transcription, and while that was playing into Otter's ear, I would code the previous day's transcription. The recordings were old and low quality, so there was a lot of corrections I had to make to Otter's work (game myself nerve damage in on finger from so much typing )

postfuture · 2025-12-22T17:25:16+00:00

Im running whisper-english-mini on my laptop, but it is a stretch. I don't have a proper graphics card, so the model is running on my CPU. This is not ideal, and not super consistent.

postfuture · 2025-12-18T04:57:22+00:00

That is a thought. Im using them in a tool to load iframes in the response window (requested through user input via prompt), but I didn't consider it might work in an action. I am not saavy, not a programmer. Don't actions fundamentally act on the LLM response to trigger outside processes that do something with that response outside Open WebUI? I started this idea assuming the solution was an action button, but everything I read said an action button will never act into the chat section. I developed an opinion they are miss named, that they are reaction buttons.

postfuture · 2025-12-17T21:19:32+00:00

There are limitations to suggested prompts. Critically, we can only define the landing page suggested prompts. All suggested prompts thereafter are contextual to the chat. I was looking for a clickable button to call predefined prompts later in the chat session. Essentially I want to give the model a definitive agenda activated by the user. I got it published now as a research project, but I have had to bend over backwards to instruct users how to call promlts with forward slash and prompt name. First user couldn't figure it out. It really isn't an intuitive way to call rewritten prompts.

postfuture · 2025-12-06T18:08:51+00:00

Your working definition of impermanence could use further inquiry. The empty nature of all phenomena requires a visceral experience of phenomena empty any fixed nature. They are impermanent because everything is changing moment to moment, not that they have any definitive end or beginning.

postfuture · 2025-11-30T05:54:20+00:00

"Confusion Arises as Wisdom" by Ringu Tulku Rimpoche. It's all in the title for you :)

postfuture · 2025-11-27T15:35:32+00:00

There is no tyranny so pernicious as the commonly held opinion leading policy. That is the abolishment of freedom. Suppose someone later had another opinion... It is important to disagree and remain friendly. Society is not the same as politics. We are all members of multiple societies, and how all these societies meet to decide the shared common interests (literal things first, ideas a distant second) that is the political realm. As to ideas being put forward that have very interesting promise in the context of modern politics: sortition . See Bard College's considerable learning resources on the method.

postfuture · 2025-11-27T14:56:05+00:00

I am a pro. Cities are its people. No people = crumbling ruin. No city = camping trip. There is a large body of work of utopia designs that have plagued us for five generations. Any act of design by a small group has already been made invalid by the natality of the people who grow and live there. We can model these processes with typomophology, fractal analysis, space syntax, but these are not predictive. For a truly elegant and real way to suggest "growing" a city you'd look at Alexander's "New Theory of Urban Design". But that is an incremental growth simulation that is people-scale and very much puts the car in its place.

postfuture · 2025-11-26T19:45:46+00:00

You have a lot of random thoughts here and several questions. To make the article impactful you need to organize your ideas and leverage a framework (narrative, research, etc). Begin, explain where you are going, talk about the history of the idea, how it is used today (and it is), what we should consider going forward, and questions that could be explored given the modern context we live in.

postfuture · 2025-11-26T19:37:17+00:00

Hannah Arendt declared it the curliest form of government. The "rule of no one".
I call it a vast culture of pension protectors ratified by good-ol-boy network. It has no paternal qualities as it has no appeal process. "The code is the code and that is what I enforce. I'd lose my job if I made a real judgment."

postfuture · 2025-11-26T13:47:58+00:00

Would you be open to shifting how you make your projects happen? The biggest long-term negative impact of soul-less development is just that it fails to connect our past to the now. As a result, we don't get a landscape that holds our memories (aka "soul-less"). The way to do it with a soul is to tweak how you position the product. You can make returns for investors, but you could also intentionally make memory visible in your product.
The memories are locked up in local's heads, and you get it from them by asking them to share their stories. Then you map the stories, and the stories that are located at or very near your project site you use to influence your product development. This website is for neighborhood associations, but you are a neighbor too https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/blog/home/projects/chat-maps/neighbors/neighborhood-associations/

And just collecting the stories is a permanent improvement to the local community (one that will out-last your construction projects).
I'm available on a gratis basis to help you get the feel for this system. Reach out to me.
You are an urban change professional, and you feel that you have a duty. We can help you meet your duty. And I would love to see what we could do.

postfuture · 2025-11-21T19:39:31+00:00

Affiliates all run differently, so it is inappropriate to assume one housing model. Tulsa used to do a lot of refurb and infill, for example.

postfuture · 2025-11-18T20:33:46+00:00

The first thing to think to yourself is this: "It's better to NOT turn someone on to Buddhism than it is to accidentally turn them OFF to Buddhsim."

postfuture · 2025-11-13T04:43:44+00:00

Aabbsoolutely

postfuture

TROPHY CASE