7 ms·

arm the homeless with blowguns and pay a per pelt bounty. then gamify it and display the leader board in time square.

FeistySkink 4y ago
Do we then track the confirmed kills with a blackchain? Perhaps we can have some kind of an exchange for pelts. Maybe even have a pelt token. I'll see myself out.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  rat coin, ticker symbol RAT. backed by real world artisan rat pelts. each coin is actually an NFT representing the actual rat, in a goofy outfit of course. too bad blow guns are powered by the carbon dioxide emissions of people's lungs or we would have had the greatest stable coin the world has ever known
  - FeistySkink 4y ago
    I think we have a pitch for Sequoia ready. Perchance you play League of Legend?
    - floxy 4y ago
      Where can one find the GPT-3 PowerPoint pitch generator? https://thiselevatorpitchdoesnotexist.com https://thiselevatorpitchdoesnotexist.com seems available.
batmansmom1 4y ago
Enter: Homeless rat breeders, farming baby rat pelts for the reward
kristopolous 4y ago
Similar systems have been tried in other places for rodents. You end up getting breeding farms and then when the project is inevitably canceled, all the farmed rodents are set free as the rodent producing factories are abandoned. Here's the famous textbook example usually given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program) Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems. This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  I somehow feel like the rats are behind that whole scheme
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    hah, the problem is, and now I'm getting into neoclassical economics, at scale farming is easier than foraging. As in, the cost of rat reproduction < cost of (rat discovery + capture + disease risk) so there's no place to set a bounty since it's always more efficient and reliable to produce rats than to competitively find them. Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not. As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free. Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
- SlickNixon 4y ago
  Enact a secondary system that rewards the discovery and elimination of illicit rodent breeding programs.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    now you're incentivizing crime vigilantism without specific people involved. These have long histories of fraud and people abusing them for personal grievances along with all the issues related to human trafficking. That's why bounties are for specific people or relating to specific crimes as opposed to some thing where you can just, say, capture supposed prostitutes and turn them in for rewards. Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling. It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system... The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency

Do we then track the confirmed kills with a blackchain? Perhaps we can have some kind of an exchange for pelts. Maybe even have a pelt token. I'll see myself out.

konfusinomicon 4y ago
rat coin, ticker symbol RAT. backed by real world artisan rat pelts. each coin is actually an NFT representing the actual rat, in a goofy outfit of course. too bad blow guns are powered by the carbon dioxide emissions of people's lungs or we would have had the greatest stable coin the world has ever known
- FeistySkink 4y ago
  I think we have a pitch for Sequoia ready. Perchance you play League of Legend?
  - floxy 4y ago
    Where can one find the GPT-3 PowerPoint pitch generator? https://thiselevatorpitchdoesnotexist.com https://thiselevatorpitchdoesnotexist.com seems available.

batmansmom1 4y ago

Enter: Homeless rat breeders, farming baby rat pelts for the reward

kristopolous 4y ago

Similar systems have been tried in other places for rodents. You end up getting breeding farms and then when the project is inevitably canceled, all the farmed rodents are set free as the rodent producing factories are abandoned. Here's the famous textbook example usually given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program) Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems. This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.

konfusinomicon 4y ago
I somehow feel like the rats are behind that whole scheme
- kristopolous 4y ago
  hah, the problem is, and now I'm getting into neoclassical economics, at scale farming is easier than foraging. As in, the cost of rat reproduction < cost of (rat discovery + capture + disease risk) so there's no place to set a bounty since it's always more efficient and reliable to produce rats than to competitively find them. Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not. As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free. Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
SlickNixon 4y ago
Enact a secondary system that rewards the discovery and elimination of illicit rodent breeding programs.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  now you're incentivizing crime vigilantism without specific people involved. These have long histories of fraud and people abusing them for personal grievances along with all the issues related to human trafficking. That's why bounties are for specific people or relating to specific crimes as opposed to some thing where you can just, say, capture supposed prostitutes and turn them in for rewards. Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling. It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system... The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency