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[RedKing]

Oh joy, let's make citizenship dependent on the military. Yeah, America will sort itself out with some good old boot camp indoctrination.

I know that's not actually your advocacy, but you can bet that any sort of "merit" barrier is just going to be recrafted into "no blacks, no leftists, bomb bomb bomb Iran".

I dunno, Germany's made it work without resurrecting the Wehrmacht. I mean, the military is free to reject candidates now for a variety of reasons, and yet minority enlistment in the ranks continues to grow. And as I pointed out in another post recently, the military seems to have done a better job screening out white nationalists than law enforcement has.

This would also be a way to close the military-civilian divide somewhat without a draft per se. Prior to the all-volunteer force, the military was seen as a respectable but not superheroic line of work, more on par with being in the National Guard or a volunteer firefighter. Since the all-volunteer force, it's become semi-mythologized and way too many enlisted buy into the Warrior Ethos thing a bit too hard, to the point where they have open contempt for civilians. And way too many civilians lack any meaningful interface with the military which breeds a lot of unmitigated hero worship or "they're all evil babykillers".

[Trekkin]

Any kind of service-guarantees-citizenship scheme has to have the capacity to usefully employ everyone run through it, though, or else you get, at minimum, resentment along the lines of "I worked hard for my citizenship but they were just an elevator operator for four years." The military might have a comparable need for warm bodies right now, but that's in large part due to the Forever War, and we probably don't want to say that conflict will continue ad infinitum as one of the fundamental assumptions of our democracy.

In a larger sense, though, forcing everyone to justify their existence with regard to our empire through work is very quickly going to run out of useful things for them to do simply because people are mostly useless for anything that really needs doing, increasingly due to automation making it so one skilled person can do the work of many unskilled people more repeatably. That's not meant to be commentary on their capabilities; it's just a knock-on effect of our technology. At some point we're going to have to come to terms with that, and threatening to make only the robot programmers really work for their citizenship is just going to make it harder.

EDIT: To give you some idea of the scale, I just went and grabbed the census projections and we'd need to employ between four hundred thousand and half a million people per year nationwide. What do you even do with two million people?

[wierd]

As much as I extremely hate this idea at its very core...


One COULD take a page out of history, and pollute FDR's public works plan.  We have an epic shitload of infrastructure that has had nearly a century of neglect from government at all levels.  In the county I grew up in ALONE, there are more than 20 bridges that have washed out since the 30s that need replacing, but never were.


Sure, it wont last forever, but then again, infrastructure *IS* a recurring cost sink.

The issue, is that the folks most likely to want this kind of horror, are the very folks that allowed the infrastructure to decay to this state to begin with, and thus will be the most vocal pissers and moaners about having to pay people to sustain it.  They will be the LEAST likely to consider it for the long-term solution this will desperately need (in terms of sustainable, recurring human work need), and will instead be among the first to assert that the free market fairy should give them an answer... Even though the free market fairy has already decided that human labor is obsolete.

[Egan_BW]

Surely we can find something to throw absurd amounts of humanpower behind? Um, let's see, we have shooting at things, talking to people, and...
Uh, have them all make Youtube videos! That's good human work, right?

No really though, I'd think that if there's a large surplus of workers, it's time to find a megaproject. Coat the earth in solar panels until we don't need to worry about energy any more or something. Becoming Kardashev type I can't be too hard, right?

[Max™]

People forget that farming and harvesting and such, plus things like framing, roofing, all benefit from dayworkers which means we benefit pricewise from them, and last I checked we love 'em in Texas. Go joke about "lazy immigrants" down there, see if you get punched in the chops. I had forgotten the shit some of them do until we got our roof redone last year, sounded like they were just jumping side to side flinging shingles at the roof. KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK *pause* KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK KACHAK *etc*

[wierd]

Surely we can find something to throw absurd amounts of humanpower behind? Um, let's see, we have shooting at things, talking to people, and...
Uh, have them all make Youtube videos! That's good human work, right?

No really though, I'd think that if there's a large surplus of workers, it's time to find a megaproject. Coat the earth in solar panels until we don't need to worry about energy any more or something. Becoming Kardashev type I can't be too hard, right?

and destroy the fossil fuel industry, that nearly to a man, the GOP senators and congressmen are deeply invested in? I think you vastly do not understand the people being discussed here...

[smjjames]

As much as I extremely hate this idea at its very core...


One COULD take a page out of history, and pollute FDR's public works plan.  We have an epic shitload of infrastructure that has had nearly a century of neglect from government at all levels.  In the county I grew up in ALONE, there are more than 20 bridges that have washed out since the 30s that need replacing, but never were.


Sure, it wont last forever, but then again, infrastructure *IS* a recurring cost sink.

The issue, is that the folks most likely to want this kind of horror, are the very folks that allowed the infrastructure to decay to this state to begin with, and thus will be the most vocal pissers and moaners about having to pay people to sustain it.  They will be the LEAST likely to consider it for the long-term solution this will desperately need (in terms of sustainable, recurring human work need), and will instead be among the first to assert that the free market fairy should give them an answer... Even though the free market fairy has already decided that human labor is obsolete.

As a method of citizenship or as a method of military to civillian? Stuff like that is only going to work for a period of time until the majority of projects get completed and things shift to what should be maintainance and upkeep and there will be fewer people needed for that as well, and you can probably bet that will get automated at some point.

Besides, you can't just choose one industry to feed either of those into because not everybody will want to be in that industry and if there are a glut of those in that industry out of work, well, too bad.

[wierd]

The new deal public works project did more than bridges and highways.  They did national park infrastructure. They did power generators. They did flood control projects.  LOTS of stuff.   Lots of stuff that NEEDS to be redone. (Remember hurricane Katrina? Yeah, most of those dikes? Not repaired correctly. You know the recent hurricane in Florida?  Yeah. Dikes failed there too. Need repair.  That thing-- Anthropogenic Climate Change?  Yeah-- Gonna make the need to continually repair those dikes very poignant, unless they decide to abandon most of the existing coastline in the coming decades and build up elsewhere. They are gonna need waaaaay more dikes to hold out the seawater to keep the coast.)

There's also the possibility to do public works OUTSIDE the US.  Say, disaster relief for allied powers, or with governments that the US wants to get cozy with.  We would have an army of people needing citizenship qualifying work.  There's a whole world of politically useful work to be done. They could brand it as "Diplomatic work" even, soviet style.

This is not to say I endorse this kind of thinking in any capacity.  It is NOT sustainable, and is NOT a good idea. 

[Reelya]

It would also open up vast avenues for corruption. You'd have people stamping off your public service requirements in exchange for money or sexual favors and the like. (or, you'd have people threatening to falsely kick you out of your public service program for not providing the money/sex bribes).

[Maximum Spin]

No really though, I'd think that if there's a large surplus of workers, it's time to find a megaproject. Coat the earth in solar panels until we don't need to worry about energy any more or something. Becoming Kardashev type I can't be too hard, right?

The best way I can think of to describe the problem with this is "We decided the greenhouse effect wasn't bad enough, so we committed to capturing as much of the sun's energy here on Earth as humanly possible! Lowering the Earth's albedo to about 15% everywhere we can reach can't possibly be a bad idea, right?"

[wierd]

Interestingly, thermal noise can be made to do some interesting work. Perhaps even useful in removing the entropic energy from the planetary environment.

There was a paper done some time ago about how an LED achieved "over unity" efficiency  Really, the only kind of photon that COULD be emitted is IR.  BUT-- that is EXACTLY the kind of photon you WANT to emit, if you are trying to get rid of heat into space. You just need to emit it at locations where the atmosphere is sufficiently thin that the energy will mostly bleed into space.

SO--- There you go.  People put to work building space elevators.  Put "over-unity" LEDs at the LEO transfer stations. Use them to drain thermal energy from the upper atmosphere.  Course, you would have to build so many space elevators that it would be absurd--- but there you go.

[Egan_BW]

The best way I can think of to describe the problem with this is "We decided the greenhouse effect wasn't bad enough, so we committed to capturing as much of the sun's energy here on Earth as humanly possible! Lowering the Earth's albedo to about 15% everywhere we can reach can't possibly be a bad idea, right?"

Energy good. Get more energy!

[smjjames]

The new deal public works project did more than bridges and highways.  They did national park infrastructure. They did power generators. They did flood control projects.  LOTS of stuff.   Lots of stuff that NEEDS to be redone. (Remember hurricane Katrina? Yeah, most of those dikes? Not repaired correctly. You know the recent hurricane in Florida?  Yeah. Dikes failed there too. Need repair.  That thing-- Anthropogenic Climate Change?  Yeah-- Gonna make the need to continually repair those dikes very poignant, unless they decide to abandon most of the existing coastline in the coming decades and build up elsewhere. They are gonna need waaaaay more dikes to hold out the seawater to keep the coast.)

You'd still have to deal with more people possibly looking for work when things shift from mostly building to mostly maintaining.

Also, the New Deal stuff was to help get the country out of the Great Depression and get people into work when unemployment was high. Plus, they didn't have to deal with the bubble bursting because WWII came to the rescue with giving industry a massive boost.

Still, there are major differences between now and then, the main one being that automation is fast on the rise and things are structured differently. A New Deal type thing might have made more sense in the depths of the Great Recession, but not now when the economy is already supposedly going well and unemployment is low. Obviously improving infrastructure is always a good thing, but the New Deal was more of a short term thing than long term.

[wierd]

The best way I can think of to describe the problem with this is "We decided the greenhouse effect wasn't bad enough, so we committed to capturing as much of the sun's energy here on Earth as humanly possible! Lowering the Earth's albedo to about 15% everywhere we can reach can't possibly be a bad idea, right?"

Energy good. Get more energy!

The deal, is that if you collect that energy, and then USE it-- it becomes ENTROPIC ENERGY.  EG--- **HEAT**   

We already are trapping a great deal of heat in our atmosphere because of increasing greenhouse gas levels-- While reflecting a substantial amount of solar energy into space as visible light (which is not absorbed by the atmosphere.)  If you absorb that energy, and then put it to use, you GREATLY increase the amount of energy staying in the earth's atmosphere.)

Hence, the absurd quip about the "Over unity" LEDs.  They operate by driving the LED at "Just under" the band-gap energy thresholds, and relying on thermal oscillations to push electrons over the gap, and thus emit photons.  When that energy is absorbed and then radiated as a photon, it can be kicked back out into space, if directed properly.  SO--- Either you build stations on the ground that collimate beams of low intensity LED emissions into very high intensity ones, and shoot them out into space, and just accept that the atmosphere is going to just absorb a great deal of it--- OR--- Put the things into space elevators, and beam it out up there.  Either way, you are GOING to need something that is "over unity" like that, to eliminate the heat from the earth's environment-- and you are going to need to deploy it on a massive scale, if you go Kardishev I.


@SMJJames

Oh indeed!  I *DID* say this was a BAD idea, that I DO NOT endorse it, and that it is NOT sustainable, did I not?  I just said it was something that "Could be done".  Not that it was practical, desirable, efficient, nor sustainable.

[Trekkin]

Come to think of it, with millions of people with diverse haplotypes at our disposal in a controlled environment we could make significant strides in several outstanding problems in bioinformatics. We could even educate them during the day to make productive use of the time between tests. Making it compulsory would also handily correct for extant socioeconomic bias in our normal cohorts, improve scientific literacy, and give every citizen-test subject a comprehensive biometric baseline for future medical reference. Heck, we could feasibly save actual samples for minimal additional cost relative to actually building and staffing the test facilities, and that only gets better if we make the whole citizenship thing require regular renewal to enable longitudinal studies of unprecedented statistical power.

What could possibly go wrong!?