Ultimately the point of ideas is to affect behaviour.
Caveat: I also play with ideas as a hobby, though this has the practical effect of improving my ability to deal with ideas I use for behaviour.
If reading about an idea neither changes your plans nor constitutes a rep of one of the sets, then it was a waste of time.
However, don't stop there: it's only truly a waste of time if you do it habitually, because no well-designed experiment can fail. You can use the pointless idea by going up one level and doing a rep of the sets anyway. You predicted that reading about this idea wouldn't be a waste of time, and it was. You learned something after all. Figure out how you erroneously assessed it as a not-waste so you can fail to do so in the future.
I myself have recently become better at this. I shall demonstrate.
This piece has many ideas which are fundamentally confused, off-topic, or straight lies. Who cares about those? They are a waste of time.
In the past I have enumerated the errors, to suggest that the plan of reading this stuff respectfully should be changed. However, I had not fully grasped that you cannot wake one who is pretending to be asleep. The fact that ideas are for behaviour is not rocket science. Mortals are not blank slates who believe whatever is written upon them. (Albeit they frequently pretend they believe whatever they're told to believe.) They can tell if reading a thing is serving their interests. If they continue to read without changing their behaviour, it means they have some irrational values. Cope and demand for propaganda. Defence against changing behaviour. They are weak, and you cannot make someone un-weak via argument, and especially not by fisking a third party.
Put another way: either you secure your shit and verify the claims, or you don't. If you do, fisking is unnecessary. If you don't, fisking is irrelevant. It's about signalling and authority or whatever. Truth is not a reliable social signal; as a political ally it regularly offends your other allies. Truth inherently knocks down every mortal authority from time to time, displaying their weaknesses.
First and most importantly, I will repeat all the ideas which are true and personally relevant.
Oh, uh, we're already done. Unfortunate.
I guess it's time for the ideas which accidentally reveal something of use.
"In most cases, he will probably not even start from the status quo—he will create a new structure from scratch. Only minimal continuity of staff is required, mainly in the security forces."
Note that this is equivalent to failure of governance. Market shocks cause recessions. Bigger shocks cause depressions. Realistically USG is 50% of the economy or more; shocks of that size cause total collapse. E.g. the sudden cessation of food stamps would result in millions of starvation deaths; multiply that across all government contractors.
Slowing this down enough that it's not a shock would likely take longer than a human lifetime.
In fact the security forces are the one thing you absolutely have to replace, because holding most of the government constant while eliminating the rest one piece at a time would require tremendous physical pressure, which means they need to be tremendously loyal to you in particular. Fundamentally the previous Regime's departments are all rebels, yet you have to continue to pay them to come to work. Have fun preventing malicious compliance.
As a result we can see the options are: status quo, failure of governance, or failure of governance. Which is why Rome died not with a bang, but with a whimper; anyone in a position to cause failure of governance decided it was a bad idea. Anyone except Gnon, that is.
"The only form of public policy that offers any interest is absolute public policy—the policy choices that are available to any new regime, regardless of the old regime’s standards, practices, policy, personnel, philosophy and organization."
Occasionally it is useful to work out how a sane, non-coercive government would lead, because it turns out you can lead yourself there. (E.g. I accidentally converted myself to my current religion. Turns out religions, although they're supposed to be social phenomena, don't have to be. A real religion has a real divine patron; if you do what your patron says to do, you're devout, and what others think or say about it could not be more irrelevant. A Pope is a crutch for weaklings, even under ideal conditions.)
Most of the time it's none of your business. The market is smarter than you. Whatever untested prototype government you come up with will have to be radically modified before becoming a production model. The diminishing returns are harsh; if you work twice as hard on perfecting your prototype, that merely means 90% of the effort will have to be immediately trashed upon contact with Reality, instead of 83%.
On the plus side, one of the useful bits is property rights. "Secure your shit." Talking about relative policy in public is also useless. Either it's your bit of government and you don't need anyone's agreement to change it, or it's not your piece of government and talking about it is empty wind. If you know the owner personally then invite them to lunch for a chat about it. If you don't, then you are outgroup and will be treated as an enemy.
As the meme goes: have problem, don't care, no problem. How should USG be reformed? Can't do it. Don't care. Not my government, not my business, not my problem.
Talking about present, existing policy is useful, because it lets you secure your shit by predicting how your country will behave. More precisely it tells you what not to try to secure, because it's apt to be stolen or trampled. E.g. NGO employment is inherently insecure. It's a career the way piracy is a career, and for the same reasons. E.g. if you need a car to get to work, then get a job where you don't need a car to get to work.
One thing a prototype government is useful for is showing, by contrast, that the existing government cannot possibly be sincere. This lets you predict that terrible results will continue, because they are intentional.
An experienced prototyper can make a prototype that's designed to act as the real government actually acts, then perturb the model to try to make it match even better. Having done this, I found: perturbing it toward greater psychopathic, sadistic Satanism made it predict more accurately. Perturbing it with charity and kindness made the model buggier and demands exponential epicycles.
The first motivation is pure sadism, as predicted by the mechanics of egalitarianism. "Egalitarianism for thee, but not for me in particular because I can make you hurt. Neener neener, you can't stop me." The second motivation is venal corruption.
E.g. America is car-addicted because GM makes lots of campaign contributions, so policies were chosen to maximize GM revenue and thus maximize campaign grift and embezzlement. Sociology is easy so these policies worked as intended. Naturally if you dance with the devil... GM was later betrayed, but even still you can see most of its revenue is political, not economic. Cars are merely an unfortunate by-product of their inefficient tax-farming. They would have long ago been eliminated if they weren't necessary for optics reasons.
"if the Chinese are willing to do all the work of making our stuff, in exchange for pieces of green paper, they are suckers and we should let them. We get all the utility. They get the disutility, and some paper. What’s not to like?"
"Common sense tells us that work is good for the human soul."
Broken window fallacy. The reason you should let the Chinese do as much work for you as possible is so that you can turn to other work. Every moment you're not spending making your own cars is a moment you can spend making a glorious tower or whatever. (Also ride bikes not cars.) In Reality, air is not scarce and work even less so.
What's not to love, incidentally, is the long-term effects of funding yourself with inflation. The thing-called-universal-morality, when it's not corrupt, is about the conflict between long and short term. America can only have China make all its stuff in the short term. If it were a long-term viable plan it would be fine, it's just not. It's not the fall that gets you, it's how the stop at the end is so sudden.
Note this has personal implications. If you can reliably and dependably make someone else do your work for you, then...like...do? Don't do this so you can be idle, do this so you can work on something less basic than the replaced chore. That doesn't make you a 'dependent' you're not 9 anymore, time to put away childish things like wanting to do everything yourself. There is the question of the service being dependable, however. If you don't have an Eccles Building normally the other personally eventually realizes they're giving you stuff for free.
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Plato examined the Republic as an analogy to the human soul. It didn't work, but the principle is sound. Likewise, if America should be isolationist, then maybe your state should be isolationist. Maybe your town should be isolationist. Maybe your street should be isolationist. Maybe you should be isolationist.
Start with a posture of isolation. Don't worry about what your neighbours are doing, let alone your town, your state, your federation, your empire. Maybe start by cleaning your room.
You have a problem in your life? You want to do something about it? Okay, well, frankly, I don't believe you, and you shouldn't believe you either. I'll tell you something you can do: clean your room. Maybe it won't help much, but it can't hurt.
If you can't even clean your room, then consider that cleaning your empire might be a tad unrealistic.
If you can clean your literal room, maybe clean the rest of the house next. Maybe clean up your affairs next - stop being friends with folk who aren't friends with you, get a proper job, pay off your debts, that sort of thing.
I chose to clean up my skull. Boy that was a job. Worked really well, though. I find a bit of dust in a corner from time to time, but not very often. I kind of miss the mess, since cleaning it up was so profitable.
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