4315/17234
My body, which once revelled in lying in the arms of Morpheus for as long as humanely possible, seems to have rejected the idea of sleep. I am in danger of going full Thatch. For the last few nights I haven’t been able to nod off and found myself pretty much awake and alert at 4am. I’ve snatched a couple of hours of sleep, before getting up and getting on with my day with little to no repercussions. I assumed that last night it would all catch up on me, but once again my brain made it very clear that it wished to remain out of the dreamscape, so I just went on Twitter to record a few of the stupid things it was thinking.
They were mainly ideas for social justice, part satire, part tongue-in-cheek and part genuine. I think it’s a good thing to challenge the parts of life and society that we accept as stone-cold truth. Often there is no reason to do that, other than the fact that that’s the way we’ve been doing things for a while. It seems crazy to challenge them, because we’ve all accepted them. But if they are good ideas then they will stand up to light parody and maybe we can come up with something better.
It seems crazy that people whose parents can pay for them to get a good education do better in life. Where’s the justice in that? It makes a mockery of exams as a way of testing intelligence. The rich people have cheated by getting a better education. Surely we have to level the playing-field a bit. How about: for every £5000 spent on your private education you get 1% deducted from each of your A level results. That doesn’t sound much, but if a public school costs £10,000 a term to attend then over the course of a private education you could drop about 25% on all your marks. If you were properly clever, with that kind of tuition you should be getting 100% on all your exams, so down to 75% would still get you an A (based on the old system from my schooldays anyway), but if you were a bit thick and had been helped through by the system you’d get knocked down to something more realistic and then wouldn’t trouble Universities or top jobs, which would be a good thing, because you’d really be thick and a cheat who thinks the solution to everything is to just pay money to right it. You could take a gamble and hope that a few terms at private school might be worth the 10% drop. And maybe kids forced to attend schools at the bottom of the league tables, because of living in the wrong part of town or not having the money to pay for an education should have their marks bolstered up a bit. If you go to the worse school and still do OK, then you’re probably cleverer than the person than the person who goes to the best school and gets away with it. The effect of such a rule might be that the people who pay for education for their children realise that the best way for their money to be used would be in making all schools of a good enough quality for everyone, so they wouldn’t be penalised for paying.
I then added,"I'd also like to see a justice system where people rewarded for good behaviour, not punished for bad (maybe violence/murder excepted)". Clearly this one wouldn’t work at all and isn’t practical, but I think imprisoning people for the normal, non-violent crimes that probably most people are guilty of at some point is a bit counter-productive. I’d just like to see some kind of Argos catalogue, green shield stamp style reward for the people who are good citizens and never do anything wrong, privileges which will be lost if you steal or are selfish or just behave like a dick. It’s carrot versus stick and it wouldn’t work, because it would rely on some kind of Stasi-like network of spies and be much more difficult to police. But is locking people away really the right response to a criminal act where the criminal does not pose a threat? Aren’t we just treating criminals like children and making prison the ultimate “naughty step”? But mostly if someone is good and nice, shouldn’t they get some kind of prize, if for nothing else just not having incurred any expense on the rest of us.
And, my night time, sleep deprived brain also speculated, how about a taxation system where people who do jobs that help others pay less than those who only help themselves. So nurses and teachers and other selfless individuals pay not very much tax and bankers and City boys and comedians pay much more. The people who help society work have already paid a tax in their time and the people who just work to make money from themselves should give back a lot more to make up for their prickishness. Of course some bankers will argue that they do help other people, but they’d be wrong. We’d have a list of professions and a decision about how much tax you had to pay.
I’d certainly quite like to see a system where, if you choose, you could earn yourself tax discounts by putting in some work for the community. So if you had a spare evening or weekend and wanted to go and do something that benefited your area, they’d give you, say £10 an hour off your tax bill. Throughout my twenties and thirties I wasted so much time sitting forlornly in my home, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. I could have used that time for others and worked alongside other people and no longer been alone.
Come on these are all genius ideas. You may call me a dreamer….
@rmehigan reminded me of one of my other fanciful notions from the old Collings and Herrin podcasts tweeting "Your best idea is still categorising toilets based on function (urination,egestion) instead of gender”. I had forgotten that one. But it is a brilliant idea. Apparently I also said that toilets would have to be made out of glass and I would have to sit underneath them to ensure that no one was breaking the rules. But apart from it being a way of me exorcising my sexual demons, it’s still a great idea.
Think outside the box folks. Or in this case inside the cubicle. It’s the only way to improve our lives.
