Thanks for the in-between ideas so far. I've already had to expand my personal WOULDDO-List with a few ideas.

My favourite one added:
Critical Thinking On The School Curriculum

I'll keep lurking.(Can also tell an idea or two myself, if asked to.)

Here is a nice idea:

Every right-to-carry proposal must include a provision allowing students, workers, and business patrons to choose to leave any environment where guns are present without question or penalty.

I found it here.

I clearly remember my first trip outside New Zealand, arriving in Honolulu, and my visceral reaction to seeing police with hand guns strapped to their belt. I was no stranger to guns, but this was my first exposure to guns specifically and openly carried with the intention to shoot people. I hope I never recover. At the time I had no idea of the scale of the problem. My "improvement" for the planet is intended to address this problem at its root, but until it gets taken up this would be a nice stop gap measure.

Silber5 wrote:Critical Thinking On The School Curriculum

Ah, you found my hobnail boots!

Ironclad wrote:I would make it International Law that politicians who wished their countries young man and women go to war, had to go to the front lines with them. Failure to do so would then 'force' all other nations of the world to shun them, financially and through trade.

Let's see who wants to go to war after that.

Trouble being, when kings in the past were required to lead their troops, it didn't act as a brake on war. Even an elementary perusal of both the history of mediaeval Europe, and the history of Classical Antiquity, tells us this.

However, one thought that occurs to me here is this. Looking at that history of mediaeval Europe, the ultimate instigators of war staying home in their comfortable palaces whilst other people do the fighting, can be considered a Papal invention. None of the Popes that authorised any of the Crusades ever left the Vatican. Somewhere along the line, the move toward professional practitioners of military arts, allowed other leaders to secure for themselves this enviable position: the power to send others out to do the actual fighting, whilst sitting at home in comfort.

World War I was probably the last major war, in which the vestiges of mediaeval chivalry manifested themselves, and only then for the brief period of time before the hideous realities of mechanised warfare,, and the accompanying capacity for terrible levels of attrition without quantifiable military gains, forced a rethink. The moment machine guns, poison gas and accurate breech artillery changed the game, so did the rules.

World War II brought another frightening development into the arena: the targeting of civilians by massed bomber raids. Suddenly, the leaders didn't have a comfortable place to hide any more. Even conventional bombing brought with it the risk of decapitating the target's political elite, which of course concentrated the minds of that political elite wonderfully with respect to the prosecution of war afterwards.

The advent of nuclear weapons has simply made the prospect even more terrifying, with respect to the decapitation of the political elite of a target nation, as if the prospect of wiping out most of the human race in the space of an hour wasn't terrifying enough. The big military powers simply cannot go to war with each other any more, without sending the few survivors of the resulting nuclear exchange two million years back to the Pleistocene, a prospect that should result in pants-shitting terror on the part of anyone sitting in the hot seat, as it were, of being head of state of one of those powers. Only someone truly deranged would reach for the big red button and declare "Game over, Planet Earth!".

As a corollary, the big powers now fight proxy wars. Usually involving the stirring up of trouble in some Third World shit hole, then either manipulating the resulting conflict through "military advisers" and semi-covert arms shipments, or taking advantage of modern high-technology air power to drop bombs by remote control. The moment ground based equivalents of UAVs become robust enough to withstand the rigours of deployment, proxy wars will probably be pursued even more intensely. Which of course gives those possible proxy war nations a huge incentive to acquire the means to tell the big boys to fuck off, usually involving joining the nuclear club. Having proxy war options shut off in areas replete with strategic resources, is probably the real reason why there's so much hot air being vented over Iran, for example.

Which leads to an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, nuclear proliferation increases the probability of World War III being started by someone unhinged, regardless of the desperate actions of the big boys to try and stop it. On the other hand, serious attempts to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in circulation globally, risks making the emergence of actual wars between the major players more likely, rather than the pursuit of proxy wars. Knowing that all out annihilation courtesy of several hundred warheads is a near certainty if you make the wrong move, tends to act as a brake on the more reckless adventures. Knowing on the other hand, that the other side only has four warheads, that you can guarantee to stop three of them reaching their targets, and that taking the hit from the fourth, whilst pretty devastating in the short term, is worth the long term success, escalates the risk enormously.

As a corollary, I'd suggest that one possible way forward, would be this. Place a 1 megaton nuclear warhead in every major city on the planet, connected to a satellite network watching for the starting of any serious conflict anywhere on the Earth's surface. The moment any of us start trying to kill each other, the satellites detonate all of those warheads, and wipe us all out. With that sort of Sword of Damocles hanging over our species, I think we'd pretty quickly work out how to stop the hotheads and the idiots from occupying positions of power, don't you?

Just a thought. Not necessarily as amusing as you might wish, though.

I think there is a star trek plot on those lines - the warheads have ai and decide themselves to....

Responsible reproduction

Kill all humans.

So the main problem with the camp at Auschwitz was that it had selection criteria?

Silber5 wrote:Assume you were able to dictate the policies and politics of any country or even of the whole world and that you want to make the world a better place. Then what would you do? I mean concrete ideas which are realizable or which you expect to be.

Take away everyone's clothes.

Oldskeptic wrote:

Silber5 wrote:Assume you were able to dictate the policies and politics of any country or even of the whole world and that you want to make the world a better place. Then what would you do? I mean concrete ideas which are realizable or which you expect to be.

Take away everyone's clothes.

Yes, but first give peace global warming a chance... so that the Scandinavians, Russians, Alaskans, etc. can enjoy the comfort of tropical nudism.

Politicians propose legislation and argue the cases for and against.
Randomly selected juries vote on it.

Warfare is abolished. When a government decides that diplomacy isn't working, they select from among their lawmakers a champion and challenge the opposition government to single combat. This will be to KO, not to the death, and will be televised. Lawmakers who kill their opponents will be forced to make concessions by the other world governments and will then face a fresh replacement.

The official global sport is mixed-gender full-contact nude tackle chess.

50% of all military budgets will be diverted to space exploration and the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources. The other 50% will go toward education, with any surplus used to feed and house the needy.

Eliminate adversarial politic and legal wrangling and build a concensus and mediated system to resolve all disputes.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:Warfare is abolished. When a government decides that diplomacy isn't working, they select from among their lawmakers a champion and challenge the opposition government to single combat. This will be to KO, not to the death, and will be televised. Lawmakers who kill their opponents will be forced to make concessions by the other world governments and will then face a fresh replacement.

The official global sport is mixed-gender full-contact nude tackle chess.

50% of all military budgets will be diverted to space exploration and the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources. The other 50% will go toward education, with any surplus used to feed and house the needy.

Can we target 1% for pilates for the nude contestants? Some of us have weak stomachs.

It's something of a moot point. I doubt military budgets would actually be very large following the abolition of war.

Make everyone gay, in a hundred years the world will be much improved.

More realistically, don't let men run anything. See Robert Sapolsky's baboon research.

crank wrote:
More realistically, don't let men run anything.

I disagree. Let's at least let men run marathons.

As long as it's in the nude. I'm quite fine with that.

crank wrote:As long as it's in the nude. I'm quite fine with that.

As long as it doesn't try to take over supremacy from mixed-gender full-contact nude tackle chess, that's fine.