Alternative reality

I really don't think the world needs to be the way it is. I also don't like most of the way it is... alternative reality is my way of coping with the world by imagining a world that is not implausibly different from this one. It's not how the world would be different if the butterfly effect was true, and I had some power to predict it anyways, and was able to cause slight perturbations that resulted in a radically different world, and it's not how the world would be if I had godlike powers to change it as I see fit, or even how the world would be different if I were dictator or king of some major world power.

Instead it's how the world would be different if I and a few clones who thought pretty much identically to me and had among us enough time to manage the institutions I'm going to describe would spend a billion or so dollars to alter the world if we had the money to do so.

I'm not going to just say education, politics, the peer review system, the media, and all that are broken, and somebody ought to fix them. Instead, I'm going to say, education is broken, and if I had $200 million in 2015 dollars to throw at the problem to try to solve it, here's how I'd spend that money. It's still a fantasy, but a fantasy that is feasible for at least someone somewhere.

My alternative reality has a few institutions that I've thought about quite a bit that I'll write about more later --  they are for the most part affiliated with each other:

• The New America Party is not as its name suggests a political party, but an organization meant to exploit the Republican-Democrat divide. It's a meritocratic organization that sets a platform of policy and looks for electable people who are willing to support that platform, and focuses all of its energies on getting those people to win the primaries of elections for either the Democratic or Republican party in areas where that particular party tends to win the follow-up election. It mainly focuses on state and local elections, at least initially.
• The International Institute of Technology and Applied Arts is a university system dedicated to real-world skills. It has no sports scholarships, no faculty to study history or language, except to the extent that these things can be applied. It doesn't even have sciences unless those sciences are applied. So it does have computer science, engineering, and robotics. For softer disciplines, people study generating hype, networking, charisma, and generally how to entertain an audience or sway a crowd. All students participate in hands-on activities and are at least partially evaluated on their ability to do things that affect things or other people. The university invests heavily on ensuring that it has a robust alumni network that helps its graduates get ahead of everyone else.
• The Unnamed Press -- needs a better name eventually -- is a news network that specializes in local news and sells with all other kinds of news available as add-ons. It makes a lot more sense that it sounds.
• Places of Production: on-demand creation of material things, together with a marketing network for people who can demonstrate that they've designed something worth distributing. Like Fab labs on steroids, pretty much.

Then there are a bunch of smaller ideas that fit generally within this whole framework. I'll explain them as I write about them at some future time.