Bit of a pet-peeve of mine with people confusing fiction with reality. Reality has constraints that fiction doesn't. Every group of people greater than one encounters a misalignment issue at some point. Fiction is useful. Narratives guide our understanding and help bring ideas to people.

But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR? Is the guy who chooses the former the good man with power or the latter? Or is it a third guy who pays for both through increased taxes so that the United States middle class pays the higher proportion of total taxes that Norway does? Groups of people have priorities and they have their own objectives.

Labor unions are generally fairly xenophobic. They were at the forefront of restricting Indians and Chinese from being citizens and the mob Hoffas held power there even till just a few years ago. A Georgian union got a bunch of Koreans deported. Who's the villain here? The Koreans? The union? The Indians? The Chinese? The people who want to employ them? Who's the good man?

Constraint-free optimization is trivial. I can do it with no problem. In fact, I shall do so here with a single line: "Make everyone happy".

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anon7725 a day ago | parent [-]

> But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR?

Both and defund ICE, and/or reduce subsidies to oil companies, and/or take an eyedropper's worth of budget from defence, and/or ...

	▲	arjie a day ago \| parent [-]
		Proposing solutions that you cannot put into place because others do not agree with you is also fiction. One might as well propose an algorithm for finding an item in a singly-linked-list that is O(1): just select the right node. Finding the right node is the entire cost; just as coordinating people for one's solution is the entire difficulty. "Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.