Principles for Renewed National Dynamism in the Post-Trump and Post-Neoliberal Era

A mandate and policy agenda for rebuilding American capacity after the neoliberal era after an anticipated crash in early 2027.

In response to RAND's report on declining national dynamism:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2611-3.html

I have released a recommended policy charter.

The Epstein Commission

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/epsteincommission

Principles for Renewed National Dynamism

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/agendaforreneweddynamismvers2

Pillar 1: Housing and Shelter

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar1v2

Pillar 2: Health and Society

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar2v2

Pillar 3: Work and Ownership

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar3v2

Pillar 4: Production and Trade

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar4v2

Pillar 5: Science and Knowledge

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar5v2

Pillar 6: Justice and Sovereignty

https://docsend.com/v/x3gfv/pillar6v2

The typical American is shackled or squeezed by forces beyond their immediate control they have little context for and decisions they had no part in making. When the people are treated as a disease to be cured rather than as a value to cultivate, that is a sign of a profoundly sick society.

Foreign policy, trade, commitments, and institutions must be re-examined after the Trump era to rebuild international credibility and strengthen the real economy rather than replace it.

For a long time, Millennials and Gen Z have especially felt a squeeze in the United States. From both sides of the political spectrum, there has been rhetoric designed to squeeze young people from both angles and delegitimize their concerns and inability to obtain a standard of living reminiscent of previous generations. The state and corporations have become a revolving door. The rhetoric and linguistic content from both political parties is equivalent but from inverted perspectives and neither contains what is actually needed:

From the Democratic party they are squeezed. You are assumed to have inherited unearned power or privilege, and the life-script of security and upward mobility is not yours to claim without apology, and claims to it are met with silencing and tone policing. A stable job, a nuclear family household, the stability to build long term relationships, and the expectation that one should be able to afford it with the social support systems to facilitate this are treated as privilege or toxic expectation to be deconstructed rather than as something institutions should aim to be built and available. Wanting them is problematic and you have not done the work and have not "earned" it and thus need to spend years in stagnant jobs to work your way up in corporate or government hierarchies; having them means you should step back. The desire is the problem. Alienation is medicalized in a for-profit healthcare system and all aspects of relationships and life are financialized as contractual. Repent by relativizing the desire and relinquishing the role. A woman's ability to choose to opt out is emphasized as a personal decision when polling consistently shows both men and women would like to have kids and own homes when given the opportunity but opt out due to socioeconomic anxiety rather than the narrative from the Democratic party that this is mostly due to cultural pressures. Rhetoric about climate change, pandemics, inclusivity/identity (which exploded immediately after Occupy Wall Street), etc can be used as proxies to avoid conversations about class and socioeconomic conditions (for example, Sam Altman explicitly appealed to climate change to rationalize replacing people with data centers - claiming that data centers would consume less energy than raising people to the age of 20). Sometimes associated with effective altruism.

From the Republican party they are squeezed. The same life-script is a test you are already failing, and you inherit original sin. If you do not have the job, the family, the house, the frame, that is a moral failing and a result of laziness or lack of work ethics or attitude even when they are structurally impossible for large segments of the population. One must repent continually for forces largely out of one's control and for failing to meet standards one would like to meet but are structurally excluded from or which require extreme social alienation which is framed as an individual choice to avoid accountability of leaders and institutions. There is tone policing and silencing of dissent, and any complaint is treated as "ungratefulness." Rules are hoisted onto Millennials and Gen Z that leaders and older generations do not or did not abide by to get ahead. Aspects of human connections are financialized in contractual ways or pathologized as a spiritual or moral dilemma. Rhetoric about security, terrorism, competitiveness in narrow domains internationally at the expense of immediate public needs, and morality can be used as proxies to avoid conversations about class or socioeconomic conditions and to concentrate wealth and power (such as the longtermist view to concentrate capital into AI investments at the cost of the real economy to "compete with China" sacrificing the immediate needs of the public and the real economy for this moving goalpost). Sometimes associated with effective accelerationism.

Happyroadkill webcomic illustrates the dual inverted semiotic functions of government and corprate power.

The political parties invert rhetoric between themselves as control systems to squeeze individuals between a narrow band of acceptable discourse which excludes real change that is needed.

Stabilizing a society at scale to maintain power hierarchies is much like quantizing gravity - it is a task to balance aggregate needs with individual conditions which are not easily reconciled. Both the right and the left act as control systems that squeeze individuals.

Beyond a crossover point (the "technological singularity") institutional cybernetics control loops like political parties and AI systems will fail to stabilize the public which could result in institutional collapse or destabilization. Increasing control produces marginal returns until controls fail and too much entropy accrues within institutions.

Balancing aggregate needs and demands with circumstances of individuals with control loops in a societies is much like an ourborus.

In late stage societies subjected to financialization of the real economy social capital can become flattened resulting in extreme political polarization.

Beyond a catastrophe point there could be a fold in the political spectrum which corresponds with the "technological singularity" crossover. At this point all social capital is flattened which results in conditions of anarchy and susceptibility towards totalitarianism, imperialist wars of expansion, or internal revolutions and civil unrest.

Addressing the Housing Shortage with Project EcoDome with Applications to Colorado Innovative Housing Incentive Program (IHIP), DoE, and Colorado OEDIT Advanced Industries Grants

An example of an EcoDome structure. Project ECODOME (Computational Optimization and Design of Owner-built Monolithic Enclosures) aims to make the process cheap and easy.

I've recently had a discussion with a number of retirees about the housing shortage, and how zoning laws and other restrictions have created a shortage that has priced out new home buyers and locked out new construction ideas. They asked me how they could do it and their ancestors could do it, but why my generation struggles with it. The fact of the matter is this is not sustainable and will have to be addressed.

US housing affordability has reached a crisis where now 74.9% of households cannot afford a median-priced new home, the average first time homebuyer is around 40, and average homebuyer is 59. That is completely unacceptable. This must be addressed at the root of the problem rather than solely through rent controls or incentives for conventional builders. The affordability crisis starts with housing.

In the 1800s housing was affordable because a typical person would be able to claim a plot of land under the Homstead Act which provided any person with the land for free under the agreement that they would develop it for at least 5 years. Home ownership was decentralized. Fast forward to the 1970s and this law ended - now the land is all owned, zoned, and any development requires things done a certain way with so many permissions that it becomes prohibitively difficult and expensive to even begin. It's designed as a form of control where every person is saddled with decades of debt for what generations ago was just given for free and could be built in a single year.

The 30-year, highly regulated, permit-first American house is a historical anomaly, and structurally, restricting and controlling housing supply to prop up housing valuations is the most foundational mechanisms that is used to control people and coerce them into dead end low wage unstable jobs. Housing was never supposed to be an asset that one works to save up for with a 50 year mortgage. Housing should be where life begins and the base one owns fully and returns to throughout life. The way in which housing is built and financed is fundamentally an unsustainable paradigm.

Keeping the population in an intentionally anxious and precarious state is a method to keep them working and compliant to prop up the economy, and is also one of the primary reasons people are not comfortable having children. Any alternative forms of housing or dwelling - especially any which undercut overvalued real estate - thus is seen as a kind of threat.

There is a crisis in morale that is at the heart of all the others and that is the collapse of the American Dream. Rather than to labor with a 50 year mortgage for the possibility of one day owning a home that one had no part in designing, it should be every person's birthright to see themselves in the design of their living space.

If we would like to deal with society's ills it has to start with cost of living which begins with housing. A restriction on housing supply and the autonomy of inhabitants to only make a living through conventional wage labor to pay rent, a mortgage, or an architect, is a historic anomaly that also strips people of any sense of creativity or ownership over their most basic living arrangements.

An exploded view of a residential ECODOME.

When it comes to housing, large portions of the building cost comes from outdated building methods, the complexity of approval and logistics, NIMBYism designed to protect property values, and labor costs. If this can be simplified and streamlined such that any person can design a home in a weekend and then build it out in less than a month at 1/10th of the cost, I would venture to say a majority of societal ills would be eliminated - and that is exactly the goal of the ECODOME Project. This may undermine fundamental assumptions about how much real estate should cost, which is an incentive which developers might not want to cross, but ultimately we need new forms of architecture that will seamlessly integrate with nature. The status quo cannot continue.

There should be more thought going into the creative design that the average person can access with their own homes than in the processes and approvals to make it happen. One's own home should be a form of self expression rather than as something to labor for for 50 years and just buy. Housing should be a place that one returns to as a baseline throughout their life, not something to be saved for across one's entire life to afford.

ECODOME architecture has many advantages to contemporary architecture including better insulation in a variety of climates and fares better than conventional housing in extreme weather conditions like hurricanes and earthquakes which could save billions of dollars.

ECODOME living roof concept. Living roofs might also be illuminated by bioluminescent foliage.

Bioluminescent plants might provide living structures with light at night.

Concept for a high density housing ECODOME Arcology. Energy storage structures may be cheaper for large scale energy storage than grids of battery cells. A combination of monolithic shotcrete and 3d printed structures can dramatically reduce costs and complexity. Can include water and waste treatment.

The fact is that housing can be affordable, safe, easy to build and design, and environmentally friendly - the incentives just run against this. Single family homes can be built at around $30k within a month with the right tools - so that is why I have spearheaded Project EcoDome which aims to create easy design software and the coupled manufacturing capability for the average person to design a reinforced EPS foam structure, cut panels, plan logistics and budgets, and design shells or earth coatings to build structures along with all the utility hookups to either live on-grid or off-grid.

Power grids store electricity in a tiered energy bank with thermal and sodium ion battery systems and high voltage wiring for cost reduction.

Dr. Mason's Stopgap Solution to Climate Change?

In recent presentations posted to YouTube by PhD scientist Dr. Mason, he claims a stopgap solution to climate change.

I reviewed my YouTube feed this past afternoon and stumbled upon a video by Thunderf00t (Dr. Mason) who was a popular figure during the Skeptics Movement in the 2010s and always found his videos to be both informative and entertaining - so when I saw his claims to have discovered a stopgap solution to climate change, knowing this is a topic directly within his specialization, I had to take a look and reach out to him to evaluate if there might be a possibility to collaborate on a grant proposal.

Every year, humans add billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Even if emissions stopped tomorrow, most of what is already up there would stay for a century or longer. Pulling it back out is possible in principle, but at current prices of several hundred dollars per ton, removing the excess would cost more than the entire world economy produces in a year.

That reality has pushed some researchers to look at a different question. If we cannot quickly remove the carbon dioxide, can we at least offset the warming it causes while the slower work of cutting emissions goes on? One of the more unusual answers comes from chemist Phil Mason, who has proposed doing it with ordinary sodium metal.

The principle behind his idea is well established. Tiny particles in the upper atmosphere reflect a small share of sunlight back into space, and volcanoes prove it. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it threw millions of tons of sulfur into the stratosphere, and global temperatures dropped by roughly half a degree Celsius for about two years.

The catch is the material. Sulfur forms sulfuric acid, which damages the ozone layer and eventually falls back to Earth as acid. That is a large part of why deliberately releasing it has proven so controversial. Harvard's SCoPEx project, which planned only a tiny test release, was shut down after years of public opposition.

The use of aerosols to control climate and weather is a topic that was also studied by the US military under the code name Operation Popeye.

Mason's suggestion swaps sulfur for sodium. When sodium burns in the presence of water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is exactly what comes out of a jet engine, it produces sodium carbonate and related compounds. These are close cousins of baking soda. They are cheap, largely harmless, and alkaline rather than acidic, so they would not add to ocean acidification when they eventually settle out.

His proposed delivery system is the existing airline fleet. Planes already fly at high altitude every day, and by his estimate a sodium load equal to about 3 percent of global jet fuel use would produce enough particles to offset a meaningful share of current warming.

He places the running cost at tens of billions of dollars per year, which is small compared with the damage climate change already causes.

Mason has also done early experiments. By spraying a liquid sodium and potassium alloy into steam, he reports producing clouds of fine particles, and he says his first measurements show dried particles smaller than a micron. That size matters, because particles around half a micron scatter sunlight most efficiently.

The idea is clever, and the early chemistry looks promising. There are still several serious problems that would need answers before anyone could treat it as a real option.

The first is altitude. Pinatubo's particles reached the stratosphere, well above where most airliners fly, and stayed there for a year or more. At typical cruising heights over most of the world, particles sit in the upper troposphere, where they tend to wash out in a matter of weeks. Shorter lifetimes mean far more material would be needed than the volcano comparison suggests.

The second is water. Sodium carbonate readily absorbs moisture, so particles leaving a humid jet exhaust could grow larger than they appear in a dry laboratory measurement. Larger particles reflect sunlight less effectively. They might also help form high, thin ice clouds, which can trap heat rather than reflect it.

The third is engineering. Sodium is corrosive to the metals inside jet engines, so it would need its own burner rather than being mixed into the fuel. Convincing airlines and aviation regulators to carry a ton of reactive metal on passenger aircraft would be a major hurdle in its own right.

None of these problems rules the idea out. They are exactly the kind of questions that careful, contained laboratory work can answer, and that work does not require releasing anything into the open air. Measuring particle size, water uptake, and chemistry in a sealed chamber is inexpensive by research standards.

Mason frames this as an insurance policy, and that framing is useful. The purpose is not to launch a global program tomorrow. It is to make sure that if the world one day decides it needs a fast, affordable way to limit warming, the science has already been done and decision makers are choosing from well understood options. Mason has deliberately made the concept public so that no one can patent it, which keeps it available as a shared tool.

When I discovered these presentations I sent them to the DSA (since I had previously campaigned with them with Hasan Piker in Denver). I was disappointed to find, however, that like my out-of-the-box ideas for re-assessing the covid response by focusing on point-of-care infrastructure and access to treatments like monoclonals over an almost singular approach to a focus on preventative measures and social distancing (though studies have shown Nordic countries that did not apply social sistancing but did have universal point of access care actually performed better over the span of the pandemic than countries which had a singular focus on attempting every person from getting sick which was an intractable problem much like trying to immediately put a halt at all emissions), this idea was not well-recieved. In fact, I was banned from the DSA discord chat. This is a problem I've noticed for many years in the sciences which have become somewhat gatekept and unreceptive to outside ideas that challenge the status quo. I suspect that regardless of the institution I am dealing with, leaders feel threatened by outside ideas - even if it is the DSA.

Cooling the planet with particles would never solve the underlying carbon dioxide problem, and it should not be treated as a substitute. At best, it could buy time while emissions come down and the oceans slowly absorb the excess - and having that time will be needed in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life while there is a transition to renewables. Whether sodium is the right material remains an open question. It is a question worth answering carefully and in the lab, before anyone faces pressure to answer it in a hurry.