should

License Schoolyard Bullies

Across New York State, bigger and meaner children are stealing the lunch money from smaller and weaker children. It happens every school day, and while it may not be fair or right, it’s likely to continue for the forseeable future. As it would be almost impossible to stop — we should do next best thing — license schoolyard bullies.

Licensing schoolyard bullies could bring in a sizable portion of revenue to the state. Nobody knows how much lunch money is stolen every year, but figuring there are millions of kids in Public Schools, there is the potential for millions of untapped revenue. Licensing schoolyard bullies could be a potential goldmine to tap to reduce the state’s yearly deficit.

Black Angus

Understanding the problem of bulling in schools, the state could dedicate a portion of funds coming from licensing and taxing bullies go to bullying prevention. A 50% tax on profits by school bullies could do a lot for all children. It would make the bullying business theoretically less profitable, and discourage bullying. It also would provide funds to monitor the actions of bullies to ensure that actions are appropiate — extracting funds from weaker children — while making sure their actions aren’t too abusive or harmful.

The fact is we are never going to get away from bigger and mean kids bullying weaker kids, and stealing their lunch money. It’s just part of growing up for the most unlucky of children. Yet, if this insitution is to exist, then at least their should be a kind of public function to schoolyard thief of lunch money, specifically funding of government.

… and remember, school yard bullies are not organized, and are too young to vote.

Population Density-based Democracy

One of the concepts I have grown interested in lately is the use of density to draw districts for governing bodies. Rather then draw districts based on historical lines, partisan politics, or ethnicity, why not draw them based on a formula that considers density?

How it would work…

  • Take the entire population of a region, state, or country, and divide it by the number of districts one views as appropiate.
  • Neighborhooring census blocks with the closest average density would be grouped together until they had equal population.

Buildings in South End

Why this is a good idea…

  • Areas with similiar densities have the most similiar needs.
  • Connect farming areas with other farming areas, connect dense urban areas with other dense urban areas, suburbs with suburbs.
  • Representives are non-conflicted by different consituencies, they can be pure in what they advocate for in their elected bodies.
  • Rural, suburban, and urban infrastructure needs are best met when communities are grouped together and non-conflicting in their nature.

Towards Tully

Politicians probably would not like this system as it would make it hard to game the system. There would be far fewer marginal districts, far fewer competitive non-primary races. Yet, fewer consituencies would be underr-epresented due to their minority status in their districts, and there would be more cohesive blocks of land.