Redistribution

The tax debate is 99% about distribution, 1% about growth. Don’t let economists fool you with their models that they don’t even pretend capture real phenomena. When they say lower corporate taxes increase growth they are modelling a world without assets where all profits are devoted to new investments in capital equipment. [...] Redistribution of global wealth is clearly the most obvious policy for a utilitarian. -- Cameron K. Murray

Replacing three horsemen

There are exactly four ways of limiting the numbers of the human population: War, famine, plague, and birth control. As long as birth control is discouraged, we are left with some combination of the other three. -- Charles St. Pierre

Incentives

I am usually pro private business except when it does not work. An important category are treatment, prevention, and elimination of negatives: Private prison industry does not work. Private law enforcement does not work. Private military industry does not work. Private drug research does not work. If you want to eliminate or prevent something, then do not privatize it. Private business wants to grow. Missions to shrink or end something must be publicly controlled. If we insist on privatization, then the financial incentives must be aligned with the desired results. For example, only give private drug companies the money that would be otherwise lost to the disease via whatever arrangements - probably some insurance scheme or similar - and make them lose money immediately when the disease appears again. -- Sakari Maaranen

Science

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience. -- Niels Bohr

Transcendence

Transcendence, mother had said, is another word for escape. But escape to where? This life is all we have. To desire escape from life is to desire death. -- Karl Schroeder

Chesterton's Fence

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. -- Aldo Leopold

Normal(s)

one of the signs of an abusive relationship is the creeping normalization of the abnormal: that one takes the most disturbing or painful circumstances as a meter stick for everyday life, and assumes that what one is experiencing is in fact the way everyone else lives, and not an aberration -- Charles Stross