"Tinya Government" is not actually a term anyone uses to refer to the set of institutions that govern the planet Tinya. The highest level results are going to be about organizations with that exact title that appear in popular fictional works. Celene—might not be able to actually tell this, just by looking at the article titles.

If she does decide to scroll down a little, she will actually see articles about the global government, and probably her knowledge of Eifweni will mean that when she sees those article titles she'll have a general idea of what their referents are.

Hmm. What is the term used to refer to the global government, then?

Maybe a reasonably close English term is 'Providence'.

Ah, so Eifwen is governed by the capital of Rhode Island. Good to know.

SEARCH: "Providence government structure"

Despite the fact that they managed to turn their name into a term for being stuck-up about sex, the Puritans did actually get some things right.

But yeah, that'll get a Wiki article.

Excellent! What does it say?

Fundamentally, the point of having Providence at all is that there are services which most Eifweni agree oughtn't be city-dependent, and some laws which have to be global. Eifwen is not cool with large population centers existing that are unable to provide urgent cryonics if necessary. Having exit rights is essential to prevent cities from turning into totalitarian nightmares. Children are not to be abused. Someone needs to collect the land value tax from the cities and distribute it evenly to all the people. And certain sorts of things are liable to cause harm even to people who are pretty far away from you.

We have slightly mixed feelings about this one, but we also aren't really gonna allow stuff like "cities where true murder is legal." Sorry about that, please just go to the "forcible early cryo is legal" city.

So the structure:

In principle, each person governed by Eifwen gets an equal say about things. But you can't actually just poll everyone about what the government does. So, y'know, representative democracy. Call each person their own Level 0 Representative. They delegate their say to some Level 1 Representative of their choice. The Level n Representatives delegate all their votes to the Level n+1 Representatives. Eventually you get some reasonably sized group of people that can have a conversation together and make competent decisions without getting weighed down by massive committee meetings.

This sounds familiar?

Well, that is what happens when you are being modelled by an author that has not actually heard of a better proposal than that one for how to implement a democracy. Surely many of the details are different, but, yeah, you wanna do the layers thing.

The legislature has a lot of different groups of experts it consults on things, of course. If prediction markets are unsure about the impact of something that Providence is considering doing, Providence will pay people to figure it out.

There are courts. Not particularly to determine the meaning of the law, if there is an argument about that you go get it resolved by the legislature. But sometimes the law will say "a court is to take into consideration the facts of the particular case to decide exactly how large the fine will be, and it should make that decision in accordance with so and so general principles" or something like that. It is not practical to make a legal system that does not rely on human judgement in any way at any point. (And, y'know, you obviously need a method for determining what the facts of a case are.) Providence's courts mostly end up arbitrating disputes between cities or prosecuting crimes that involve several different jurisdictions.

Many services provided by Providence are done by just hiring a company to do it, or by Providence predictably being interested in buying impact certificates, or strategies like that. Lots of public institutions are actually sufficiently funded by donation, but Providence will sometimes (if a supermajority is in favor) reallocate some of their excess revenue away from UBI and towards solving some collective action problem.

If the geographic location of something is very relevant, usually cities will be in charge of it. So the services Providence provides are mostly stuff like research or software where the impact is too widely distributed for any one city to have enough incentive to make it happen. Or niche things, where it's better to have specialists fly around between cities than to have a specialist in each city.

We have slightly mixed feelings about this one, but we also aren't really gonna allow stuff like "cities where true murder is legal." Sorry about that, please just go to the "forcible early cryo is legal" city.

nooooo eifwen I thought you were based

Just kidding, this seems totally reasonable.

Ok so what about the other stuff

But you can't actually just poll everyone about what the government does.

You totally can! They admittedly would not be very knowledgeable about a bunch of things but it's definitely possible. 

And in theory, you could just poll people about their desired worldstates and then let the decisions of how to get there be carried out by

actually probably the first part is not true

....

Who the hell is dath ilan?

You totally can!

Polls about what people want Providence to achieve, and about what methods they think are best to do so, are in fact performed. Usually they're even rather close to what the representatives ultimately end up deciding. And of course prediction markets are considered. But we've decided it's better to have someone making a judgement call based on the polls and markets, than to just try hooking it up directly. At the end of the day, well-informed human judgement about when to defer to the recommendations of the polls and markets and when not to will avoid some categories of mistakes, if you're careful about who you put in charge.

(Of course, some cities have actually tried the futarchy thing.)

Prediction markets, she's heard of those.

If prediction markets are unsure about the impact of something that Providence is considering doing, Providence will pay people to figure it out.

Can't they just subsidize the prediction market directly?

So it seems like the central government, Providence, puts down a set of overarching guidelines for the cities to follow, and generally cities can do whatever they want outside of that, kind of like Scott Alexander's Atomic Communitarianism. And of course, there are exit rights, and they tax negative externalities. What about freedom of motion, though? What if someone can't afford to travel to another city, or perhaps they have obligations/attachments in their original city?

And Providence contracts out work to companies, that's pretty standard. The governance system is pretty interesting, Celene does object to the electoral college being used in the US but a bunch of the problem is because of the states having winner-takes-all policies and this doesn't have that. How is the number of representatives per level chosen? How do they deal with momentum effects where it's hard to switch between a limited pool of representatives? Is it just that the top 1000 (or 1296) representatives are chosen? Do they have ranked choice for representatives, who then have ranked choice for representatives, and so on and so forth? That seems a bit too complicated. Do representatives have to be honest about who they intend to vote for?

Or wait, is it like, that there can be an arbitrary number of representatives of each level, but their voting power scales in proportion to the amount of level 0 representatives that stand behind them? Is that what "delegate their say" means? 

Still, it seems like that process could continue arbitrarily long, then, since there's no mechanism forcing representatives to vote for popular candidates.

Well, she supposes it could only continue up until the world's population is consumed in politics.

Providence's courts mostly end up arbitrating disputes between cities or prosecuting crimes that involve several different jurisdictions.

...ok, so if a city's court is blatantly corrupt, and a thief robs you, and they pay off the city with the money they stole from you, and the city thus finds them not guilty, do you just have no recourse in that situation?

What is "land value tax" again? Celene has heard of the concept vaguely, but doesn't know what it means. Is it like some form of property tax? Does Providence only use land value tax? Why?

What about freedom of motion, though? What if someone can't afford to travel to another city, or perhaps they have obligations/attachments in their original city?

...Plane tickets aren't that expensive? Contact a charity or something if you're really stuck.

We recommend not taking on obligations or forming attachments in cities that you intend to leave. It is possible to take on legal or contractual obligations that prevent you from leaving a city, but Providence pays pretty close attention to make sure that's not being abused in some way.

How is the number of representatives per level chosen?

Through lots of smart people thinking about the right number.

Do representatives have to be honest about who they intend to vote for?

...Why would you continue giving your vote to someone who lied to you?????

 Is that what "delegate their say" means? 

Yes

Still, it seems like that process could continue arbitrarily long, then, since there's no mechanism forcing representatives to vote for popular candidates.

Generally someone becomes a valid choice of a Level n+1 Representative when enough Level n Representatives agree that they'd send their votes to that person if they were a valid choice.

If a city's court is blatantly corrupt, and a thief robs you, and they pay off the city with the money they stole from you, and the city thus finds them not guilty, do you just have no recourse in that situation?

We recommend not moving into cities which have no mechanism preventing them from pulling that sort of thing. "Binding commitment enforced by Providence" is not an uncommon choice of such a mechanism, but... most cities do not make such a commitment, and then proceed to break it?

What is "land value tax" again?

The basic idea is:

1) "Volume on the planet" is a good with precisely zero supply elasticity. This means it can be taxed with zero deadweight loss.

2) Philosophically, no one has any particular claim to physical space. It's not the result of their labor, or anything, it was just... there. So it's pretty justified to take the value of the space and distribute it among the population, instead of just deciding it belongs to some people.

It's a lot of Providence's funding. They also tax domain names on the global internet and a few other things for similar reasons. (Lots of cities do it for electromagnetic frequencies, but those don't need to be allocated globally.) But they also get a decent bit of funding from donations, and there's an occasional service that they request payment for.

They are not completely unwilling to tax things which are less... philosophically justified, if needed. They did when they were going full steam ahead on cryonics infrastructure. But the land value taxes do go pretty far.

We recommend not taking on obligations or forming attachments in cities that you intend to leave.

We recommend not moving into cities which have no mechanism preventing them from pulling that sort of thing.

What if you were born there as a child? Or does Providence have a special organization designed to evaluate if a city is fit to legally raise a child in, with strict binding commitments required to receive such a qualification?

...Why would you continue giving your vote to someone who lied to you?????

exit scams? Or wait, no, four year elections might not exist here, you can probably just instantly change your vote.

Generally someone becomes a valid choice of a Level n+1 Representative when enough Level n Representatives agree that they'd send their votes to that person if they were a valid choice.

Ok, sure, that makes sense.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

She can't think of any automatic objections to the land value tax thing, it does make sense. And, well, clearly they do get enough money that way? She's worried it might lead to some perverse incentives, but, then again, it's probably not worse than those set up by Earth tax codes.

And this is how basic income is funded, presumably?

Ok, she's been making a bunch of nitpicks which are almost immediately addressed but WHAT THE HECK THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN EARTH WHERE ALMOST EVERYONE AGREES THE SYSTEM SUCKS EXCEPT FOR A SMALL MINORITY MAKING AD HOC JUSTIFICATIONS AND YET NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING TO CHANGE IT.

Or does Providence have a special organization designed to evaluate if a city is fit to legally raise a child in, with strict binding commitments required to receive such a qualification?

Yeah, more or less this? Providence also ensures inasmuch as feasible that you aren't going around having children behind their back or whatever.

exit scams?

If there's some sort of clearly uncouth behavior going on, someone will raise an objection and they'll make sure people get a chance to reallocate their votes before making any binding decisions.

She's worried it might lead to some perverse incentives.

Well really a lot of the point of taxing things with low supply elasticity is to minimize these, but we don't claim to have eliminated all perverse incentives or anything. We can only do our best.

Yeah, more or less this?

Huh. That feels surprisingly...

Well, it doesn't seem very possible to avoid children feeling pushed away or isolated from their home city? Like, let's say a child is raised in a more predictable city, and feels stifled by the constant structure and expectations of order there, or a child is raised in a slacky city, and feels frustrated whenever they can't plan for something. She doesn't think that's something Providence would really enforce? In general she's not really sure how you could prevent this problem.

Then again, the kind of situation she was envisioning was "child grows up in an fascist dictatorship location that forces everyone to conform to a certain norm" and that's not really the kind of thing that will happen here, probably.

Anyways, she thinks she gets more or less a basic overview of how Providence works. The next thing she should search up!

SEARCH: "Emergency Services."

That seems relevant.

Oh, and she needs to know what their deal is, not just be directed to their hotline or something.

Emergency Services are a network of organizations that ensure public safety by responding to emergencies. Typically, these organizations coordinate closely with each other and prioritize speed, adaptability, and trustworthiness.

The page gives a general overview of approaches taken to helping with emergencies. Mostly cities fund infrastructure for Emergency Services, and then if you in particular end up needing an ambulance ride it'll come from your insurance.

It emphasizes that Emergency Services are typically Lawful—you can usually do stuff like tell them you're planning a crime and talk about harm mitigation without getting arrested. Not all Emergency Services are like that, but Providence will interfere if any falsely claim to be Lawful.

Most Emergency Services aren't ensured to be truly universal, except for a few things like emergency cryonics, true murder prevention, and child protection. But you have to have sought out a really weird city if you don't have access to a fire department or to ambulances or whatever.

What if you don't have insurance?

Also, SEARCH: "Nucleus Emergency Services info"

If you don't have insurance, you're generally going to be expected to pay the bill if you can. The details for what happens if you can't vary, but usually one factor in play is "cities will be hesitant to let you do things where you might need urgent help if you don't seem able to pay."

The article on Nucleus's Emergency Services lists out what services are available and gives some logistics. Nucleus has allocated an unusually large amount of its resources to help people who end up hurting themselves doing really stupid shit. 

Part of the social contract of Nucleus is that if you screw yourself over in a way that is sufficiently expensive to fix, the city is not necessarily going to bail you out. You're responsible for yourself, here. Pay your insurance bills.

(Though you'd have to be really really remarkably idiotic to get yourself in a situation where they won't bother trying to cryonicize you.)

Hmm. And presumably other cities do the same thing, since Nucleus spends more than average on helping people who screw themselves over?

Alright. Let's get some more information on Nucleus, then.

She'll search for a Wiki article on Nucleus?