Ideas to Improve the USA

Below is a list of ideas for how to improve the USA, mostly, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world.

US End Major Military Presence in Iraq and Afghanistan
Eight plus years. Thousands of US, Iraqi and Afghan lives lost. Both of these countries are full of adults who need to stand up and run their lives and lands as best they are capable. Perhaps they are not even meant to be countries, at least not a single country. We've given both plenty of chances to get their act together. At some point we have to say enough is enough. Let's call it victory and come home. Continue to give aid and assistance, and keep an eye on their activities, particularly anything that could hurt us. If Al Qaeda or another entity hits us, we hit them back harder. In the meantime, be vigilant, try to disrupt and defuse any threat, but restrict our means to anything that doesn't involve keeping a standing army in those countries.
See also: The Three Trillion Dollar War

Eliminate Foreign US Military Bases
Why does the US have military bases all over the surface of the Earth, unconnected from and far away from the actual national mainland territory of the USA? Are we an empire? Are we a military hegemon? Do we want to be these things? Do we have to be these things? How come many other populous, prosperous, high-tech, peaceful countries can get away just fine without doing this, but somehow the USA thinks it must? One possibly reasonable argument justifying the current state of affairs is that those countries have the luxury of being that way because the US provides them a shield via our foreign military empire. As an experiment, let's pull back and see what happens. We'd save so much money, and improve our image in the eyes of millions if not billions around the world. Even with US military forces restricted to near or on the US mainland, we'd still have the world's largest, most powerful and most high-tech military, complete with lots of reconnaisance, intelligence and deterrant capability. We wouldn't become weaklings or wimps: if somebody hit us we'd hit them back harder until they stopped. If someone takes US citizens hostage, we try to free them using force, technology and guile.

US Govt Should Not Torture
If you knew someone who tortured another, you would think that person was evil/bad. Therefore, it is common sense that torture is evil/bad. One of the most common and strongest justification for having a law is to serve as a declaration by society that a certain thing is considered evil/bad, should not be done, and should be punished if it is, becomes known and convicted of it, and, ideally, steps taken to reduce/eliminate the chance of the act happening again in the future. Therefore, in addition to it already being clearly illegal by international laws which the US government has declared it adheres to, it is (or should be) illegal by US federal laws as well. To give just the most recent example, the US government/military appears to be torturing Bradley Manning, and has been for months, even though he has not been convicted of a crime, and if anything, the crime(s) he might be charged or convicted with are one that are non-violent in nature. Meanwhile, former President Bush clearly led an effort to invade Iraq and under intentionally and dishonestly spun pretenses, causing the deaths of at least 4000 US lives, and thousands more Iraqi's, and yet to this day neither Bush or Cheney has been convicted of any crime related to it, nor has he been tortured. (The closest indirect 'slap of the wrist' was against Cheney aide Scooter Libby, in the Valerie Plame case which was an act that by any reasonable person's interpretation was an act of, literally and explicitly, treason, and one that was directed from, at the very least, the 'office' of the VP Cheney. And yet, Cheney walks free. Treason, people. Think about it. Now back to Manning. Now back to Cheney. Hmmmm...) In short, the gap in treatment is breathtakingly shameful and contributes to a massive loss to any supposed claim by the US government to ethical credibility, trust or moral authority both within the US and around the world.

Good Guys At Home Don't Wear Black Hats Abroad
Stop funding or doing trade/arms deals with foreign governments which are autocratic and oppressive. Giving aid to dictators makes us look like hypocrites on the world stage. We are not The Good Guys just because we say we are. We have to act that way. Let's not keep setting ourselves up for Blowback.

US Citizens Gain Right To Record Government Agents
If the police and other so-called law enforcement entities have the 'right' to record or otherwise surveil any citizen as part of the carrying out of their official duties then it seems only fair that private individual citizens also have the right to record or otherwise surveil any government agent carrying out their official duties or at least acting in an official capacity while interacting with a private citizen.

Employers Should Get Out of Providing Healthcare Plans to Their Employees
It is not necessary. It has nothing to do with that company's core business. It is an extra burden placed on that company. By having health care plans tied to one's employer it ties the employee to that company, making it harder or in some cases seemingly impossible to quit or change jobs. At most, health care plans/insurance should be up to the private individuals/families, possibly with the assistance of a government provided or regulated service as an option.

Eliminate Income Tax Witholding on Employer Side
Eliminate payroll tax withholding on the employer side. Having to pay an employee's income taxes essentially in two different places rather than one is inefficient, and places a greater administrative burden on the employer, and is an activity that is not part of the company's core mission. Essentially it is a government duty that has been pushed off onto every employing company. Plus, most individuals have multiple sources of income anyway, besides classic employee job pay. Already today there are forms of income where taxes are not automatically taken out, or even reported, before hitting the recipient. Yet somehow our current system muddles along and manages to take in enough taxes to the IRS. Also, by not withholding taxes on the company side the employee gets a higher nominal take home check, earlier, and has greater freedom to put that money to uses which benefit him to a greater degree, such as earning interest on the balance for the time period until it is needed to send an income tax payment to the government. In some cases, an individual determines he owes no taxes, or, less than what has been withheld by his employer, and therefore is owed some or all of those monies back at tax time. If it was never withheld in the first place, there would be no delay in getting it back later. So it's a win for employers, it's a win for employees. It may or may not be a negative for the government, but government is supposed to serve and work for the interests of the people, not the other way around.

Simplify US Income Tax Rules
Flat 20% for all income types, at all income levels. No exceptions, exemptions, deductions, credits or special cases. Examples of income types which will be treated the same: hourly wages, salary wages, contractor payment, publishing royalties, patent royalties, stock dividends, capital gains, savings account interest, asset rental/lease income, lottery/prize winnings, donations, gifts and estate inheritance. Reams of tax code and painful compexity go away. IRS can be much smaller. Fed gov't payroll smaller. Reduced numbers of laywers, accountants, etc. needed that are fundamentally a drain on society. The actual rate is not important, just that it's flat. The actual percentage rate is arbitrary and tunable. If 20% would not produce enough revenue to the IRS to replace existing flow, then raise the rate. If produces more, then lower it. Which is simple and obvious and easy to do. This proposal also reduces unnecessary spying by government on private individual lives. A flat and unified tax rate could be reasonably argued to be both the most fair income tax scheme possible (by treating everyone equally, and all forms of work and income and assets equally), and it is the easiest to understand, and the cheapest to administer. Win, win and win.

Basic Universal Income
Each adult citizen receives say $12k/year in income paid by Federal government. Everybody gets same amount. Citizen doesn't have to meet any special requirements. Citizen can choose to work or not, and can choose to seek out additional income sources, or not, as they wish. If you're too sick to work, you still get it. If you're too old to work, you still get it. If you have some mental disability that prevents you or impairs you from getting employment, you still get this. Both the poor, the middle-class and the "rich" all would receive the exact same amount. It would be the same whether the individual is disabled or not. It would be the same regardless of their age, gender, race or religion. Whether they were a certified genius or certified imbecile. Same regardless of marital status or sexual orientation. Same whether had a minor criminal history or not. (Perhaps certain very serious crimes cause you to lose it, but this is a detail picking around the edges.) Want to take a temporary sabbatical from your job to say travel around the world? Assuming your employer is otherwise fine with it, you can do it, and while on sabbatical you'll still get the BUI checks. Must be a legal US citizen, however.

Minors do not get BUI. If you are an adult who choses to create or adopt a baby, you are not paid for it by the government. Since you are not paid by the government you are not paid per kid and therefore not incented to create more kids. Therefore the government will become more agnostic with respect to whether citizens should have kids or not, or how many, since they do not subsidize it. It is up to the individuals to decide, and weigh the trade-offs. If you are a parent or contemplating becoming one, the preceding might sound like a negative effect for you. But there are also many positives, which include the following. What if you are a parent and want to take time off from work to take care of your kids? Still get the BUI checks. You are pregnant or your spouses is, and want to take time off around the time of child birth? Still get the BUI checks. Want/need to quit work or reduce job hours in order to take care of sick or elderly family members? Still get the BUI checks. Want to have both parents working in order to maximize income? You can do that, and you'll still have the BUI checks for both parents, to help with the increased costs of daycare. Want one parent to work while the other stays home to take care of the kids? You can do that, and you'll have the security of knowing the 'stay-at-home' spouse will still be getting BUI checks, so the negative financial impact is lessened -- and might even be eliminated entirely if it was the lower-earning spouse that quit to stay home. But again the beauty of the BUI system is that individuals and parenting couples still have complete freedom of choice in whether and how to create and provide for a family.

The amount you receive in BUI would be the same regardless of whether you were unemployed, or had a job, or had multiple jobs, or were living off royalties or a trust fund, or stock dividends, or lottery winnings. Employment is not disincentivized because if the citizen chooses to acquire a job, for example, he would simply earn income from that job in addition to his BUI checks from the government. If you want a higher-paying job, you can do that, and you still get the same BUI check in addition to that. Want to spend all of your BUI each month? You can do that. Want to save all of it, or some of it? You can do that. You're still incented to save, you're still incented to work, and to work more, and to earn higher rates of pay for your time, and so on.

Since this program would be easier to administer, it would require less government expenditure than other similar programs. This program would make several other existing government programs redundant and unnecessary, such as (to name just a few): unemployment insurance, social security, disability, food stamps, etc. Since those other government programs would be redundant they can be shut down, and government expenditures are reduced (which helps offset the new expenditures required for the BUI program, perhaps only in part, perhaps fully, perhaps even creating a surplus -- depending on the final numbers we choose.) It would also reduce need for and/or make redundant many private pension programs and charities.

To keep taxes simpler, BUI would not be taxable income (since it would be paradoxical/redundant, since tax inflows to the government are used, in part, to fund BUI outflows anyway.) --- so if the "flat x% income tax, all types" reform is also implemented, the only exception/deduction allowed would be an amount equal to whatever BUI a citizen receives. If the citizen had additional income, beyond BUI, that additional income would be subject to income tax per all otherwise standard rules in effect. Important to note that the actual nominal amount chosen for BUI is arbitrary but can be a function of reasonable real-world variables such as cost-of-living indices. Cost of living would include items like food, shelter, clothing, basic utilities, and perhaps a few other categories (TBD). To compensate for significant differences in COL among various regions within the US, it is conceivable that we could allow several different BUI levels, each applicable to a different region, some higher and some lower, to reflect the varying cost-of-living. Ideally, it would be better not to do that, to keep things simpler and more "fair". If a citizen chose to live in a higher COL area then he will simply have less money leftover to spend on discretionary items, whereas if he chooses to live in a cheaper region he will have more money leftover for discretionary items -- and therefore he is incentivized to live in cheaper areas, but not forced to, and still has total freedom of choice.

Why did I pick $12k/yr? Well, it's a good starting point. A basis for moving forward. It also has the nice quality that it is exactly $1000/month, which should cover the costs of rent+food+utils needed by a single individual in most places. It also works out using the following logic. There are approximately 200m adults in the US as of 2010. By adult I mean age 18+. If all 200m adults received a $12k/yr BUI that would require a total BUI outlay (in payout checks to citizens, but not including overhead/admin/infrastructure costs), of about $2,200B/yr. If you look at the US Federal 2010 budget, the total money spent on the combination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance -- all of which BUI effectively replaces -- that worked out to around $2,000B/yr. Both are around $2 trillion. With only a $200B gap. Assume there's an additional $200B/yr cost for BUI's admin/infrastructure. So we have to cover a $400B gap. Well, we could easily cover that just by pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan and letting the Bush Tax Cuts for the richest Americans expire, to pick a thumbnail solution -- and have money to spare. It is more complex than this, but at an approximate level of detail, the math works out. When it comes to details and fine-grained numbers, we can make it work if we have the willpower.

Wikipedia entry on similar: Basic Income

Payoff Federal Debt and Eliminate Deficit Spending
The solution is obvious and non-magical, just takes political courage and multi-year persistance of execution to carry it out. It is not a fundamentally hard or unsolved problem.

Reduce US Govt Mail Delivery Frequency
Make the US Post Office go from delivering mail 6 days a week (every day but Sunday) to only 3 (say M, W, F). Reduces Fed gov't deficit. Urgent needs can be provided by private businesses such as FedEx. Furthermore, arguably the USPO mission should be further reduced to only serving the government, and let all private/business mail be handled by private mail delivery companies. The exact number of days to reduce govt mail delivery is not as important as simply reducing it by some amount. Mail delivery service available 24/7 would still exist, just not via a government service.

Discontinue Federal Funding of the Arts
Stop funding arts by Fed gov't. Reduces deficit. Artists can self-fund, seek patrons or sell their wares or services. The vast majority of art is and will continue to be created anyway, either voluntarily on the part of the artist, or, for pay by consumers and private wealthy patrons. Eliminating government funding would have at most a microscopic effect on the amount or quality of art produced in the US. The government needs to cut corners somewhere, and this is one of the easiest ways to do it because (a) it's discretionary, and (b) no one will get hurt.

Eliminate References to God in Official Government Documents, Ceremonies and Speeches
Truly carry out a reasonable implementation of the principle of separation of church and state. Not all citizens are religious. Of those who are religious, not all believe in God, a single God, or the Christian God. Of those that do believe and worship a single Christian God not all want or approve of the government citing it/him/her in official US/state/local government matters, document and speeches. There is another school of thought and line of argument out there that suggests that any citing of God (or any god or type of god) is a sign of superstition and ignorance, and therefore sends a signal to the rest of the world and to educated people that the US is a somewhat backward country, not necessarily at the forefront of human thought, and not led or driven by truly intelligent people with mature adult minds and sharp critical thinking skills. There is another argument which says that the God references are a form of emotional manipulation and propaganda, meant to incite feelings of love or fear, or to increase nationalistic feelings, or outright jingoism. Regardless of which particular argument one uses to promote it's elimination, one thing that most reasonable people can agree on is that it is probably a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, that it promotes one religion above others, and that it accomplishes nothing tangible and serves no functional purpose. The US government should serve and reflect the better nature of all it's people, not just some, and not just some of the time. If the argument for keeping it is that it is a positive cultural tradition, the counter-argument is that there are better traditions to carry forward, better ways to keep history alive, better ways to learn about history, and that we shouldn't be trapped by the past. Many of these God references got 'embedded' into government traditions back in a time long before computers, the Internet, human flight, spacecraft, relativity, paleontology, evolution, the discovery of DNA, and a long list of other discoveries and advances in our understanding of the physical world. Let's get with the times and truly modernize this strange echo from a previous age. Keep God in your own home, if you wish, and your own minds and hearts, and among your own family and friends, as you choose. But keep it out of our common government. It has no business there.

US Congress: Eliminate the Filibuster
The filibuster enables the minority party to overrule the wishes of the majority party and therefore, ostensibly, the wishes of the majority of voters. This causes all sorts of problems when trying to pass legislation that the majority of voters (and, ostensibly, the citizens as a whole) want to see passed. This should end. The most recent painful example was when Congressional Democrats wanted to pass a bill extending long-term unemployment benefits. The Republicans vowed to filibuster any such bill, until/unless a bill was passed to extend the so-called Bush Tax Cuts for the richest Americans. Surely, the majority of citizens would be for extending unemployment benefits givin the length and depth of the recession, and the majority were opposed to extending tax cuts for the rich that were only meant to be temporary in the first place. And yet, due to the threat of filibuster, the Republicans (appear to) get their way. This is broken.

Better Voting: List-Based with Instant Runoff
Current system encourages and perpetuates two party domination of US national-level politics, Presidency and Congress, by Republican and Democratic parties. With preference list-based votes, a citizen's true intentions and ideal choice of government can be more accurately captured and acted upon -- while not suffering from fear or reality of "throwing one's vote away" on so-called minor parties or candidates, or candidates or proposals that don't have big money backers. Also having instant runoffs are essential to making it fast, cheap and efficient, and to not discourage or prevent a lengthy ordered list of preferences from being submitted.

Better Voting: Universal Auditability
Every citizen of the US, whether employed by the government or not, whether belonging to any political party or not, or belonging to any particular media organization or not, etc. should have the right and ability to conduct an independent recount of all submitted votes and therefore independent recalculation and determination of the winning candidates or choices. Only by ensuring that *everyone* can do this can we minimize the chance that fraud has occurred. The more of the process which is done in secret, the more that is vulnerable to being fraudulently manipulated to produce a distorted, unjust representation of the actual will of the people.

Better Voting: Merit-Weighted Votes
Go from "equal weight" voting to "merit weighted" voting. Why does Bubba's vote count as much as Dr. Smith? We can still allow (nearly) everyone to vote, but let's weigh the impact of a person's vote by their intelligence, education level and accomplishments. Higher IQ, more weight. Higher attained accredited education level, more weight. Passed more tests? More weight. Higher scores/grades? More weight. More experience? More weight. Make it so you cannot vote yes/no on a bill unless you've read it. Or make your vote count more if you've read it and then passed a quiz on it, and the higher your score on the quiz (which asks you about salient points of the bill) the higher your vote will count. Maybe give more weight by age, as well, to reflect (typically) more wisdom and experience (though maybe it should be a curve so it tapers down to reflect senility onset?) The degree to which we implement some form of merit-based voting is variable and arbitrary, though doing it to any extent would be better than not doing it at all. For example, other factors to take into account might include: accumulated more money? (though work/innovation, *not* through gifts/trusts/daddy's-friends) More weight. Better credit record? More weight. More muscle mass? More weight (because you worked to do it, which is smart and productive.) Almost any system like this would produce better results than one in which any old dipshit's vote counts as much as a doctor, engineer, scientist or astronaut. Why would we want to weigh by intelligence/education? Those with less IQ/EDU would be less likely to think logically, they would have less knowledge of history (of mistakes made in the past, of tactics tried in the past, etc.), and would be more vulnerable/gullible with respect to propaganda (eg., Fox News), and less amenable to reason. Demonstrated inability to think logically? Less weight. Demonstrated tendency to be emotionally swayed by propaganda, or to not recognize and discern between propaganda and objective/honest information sources? Less weight. If the issue being voted on involves one or more areas of technical expertise (some science, military, business, economics, law) and the voter in question has demonstrated, certified expertise in those areas (a scientist, a military officer, an economist, a lawyer or judge, etc.) then that voter's vote should probably also be weighed more than someone without expertise in those areas. Lastly, many issues that come into play with political and national economic decisions are often not entirely "new" issues or events: there's often precedent, sometimes many dozens or hundreds of previous similar situations in the past. Someone with a better knowledge of history will be able to leverage that knowledge to arrive at more accurate and realistic conclusions about what should be done related to the current issue at hand. They'll have a better idea as to what kinds of strategies or "fixes" will work better than others, and what kinds of things tend not to work, or indeed have been shown over and over again in the past to not work at all. Someone who is ignorant of history will not know these things, and will be at a disadvantage when forming judgement. Yet they'll still form a judgement, then go into the voting booth and press a button and their vote will have just as much impact: noise cancelling out signal. Therefore, it's probably also good to weigh votes more made by people with a greater objectively demonstrated knowledge of history -- a thumbnail implementation of this could involve giving greater weight to votes by those with a history degree, with B.A counting more than HS diploma, with Masters in History counting more, with Ph.D. in history counting more, and so on. None of these proposals should, I hope, be controversial if we agree that our goal is to produce better outcomes with our voting systems, with ballot issues, and with national elections.

Ban Backyard Dogs in Cities and Suburbs
They regularly bark loudly (at night, in mornings, when adults trying to sleep for work, etc.), jump fences and attack innocent people. To strangers/neighbors they are vicious, mindless and rude. Small, don't bark or kept indoors? Then probably okay. An alternative to banning, which would only address the sound pollution aspect but not the physical danger aspect, would be to come up with some reliable sound dampening system to prevent the sound of dogs barking from reaching other properties. Indoor dogs as well as outdoor dogs in rural areas are both much less of a nuisance to non-owners so could probably remain unregulated. A dog is very territorial. It is wired to 'defend' its territory. Unfortunately, to a dog's mind his territory does not end at the fence line, it continues past it. It is a very common experience for someone to walk into their own backyard, and because their neighbors have dogs and they can see/hear you, they go apeshit and start barking loudly and aggressively. This makes our life experience worse. Let's solve this. It's solvable.

Legalize Prostitution
The current way we treat prostitution is both inconsistent and hypocritical. It's considered 'bad' and illegal -- except it's legal in some US states and some countries. Let's make it legal everywhere or illegal everywhere and stick with it. It's considered unethical yet we allow pornographic photo, film and video production. If a man pays a woman for sex it's prostitution and illegal. Yet if a man pays a woman to have sex with another man (possibly himself, possibly indirectly through a chain of paper businesses), while the sex is filmed, then magically it's no longer prostitution and therefore legal. It's considered unethical or "a failing" to sell your body for sex (unless its filmed) but it's fine to sell your body as a furniture mover or boxer. Arguably to some extent when many people get married there is an aspect of prostitution involved. If a man pays a woman to have sex with him it's prostitution but if he asks her out on a date, and pays for dinner and a movie, and then later that night they have sex, that's not considered prostitution because it was more indirect. Whenever and wherever prostitution is illegal it attracts organized crime and makes it more likely that those engaged in it are also involved in drugs or are themselves addicted to drugs. It is true that when anyone is promiscuous (of which we assume prostitutes are due to nature of their job) they are more likely to acquire and transmit STD's. There are ways to fight this and mitigate this risk, but you can never reduce that risk to 0. Since you can't reduce the STD risk to zero with prostitution, and STD's are also a problem for people having sex even when prostitution is not involved, it means there isn't a difference in kind but only at most one of degree, between the two cases. It stands to reason that if someone had sex by profession, that they would be more likely to practice safe sex techniques, and be more likely to test for STD's, more frequently, and overall be more educated about the health considerations, than someone who only had sex as an "amateur". Another argument in favor of legalizing it is that the ability to have sex is something there is market demand for, and lots of people can provide it, and therefore it is yet another way for working class people to earn a living income. Yes there are dangers. Yes there are downsides. But that is true of other fields and other types of human activity as well, and yet we allow plenty of those to be legal (boxing, race car driving, professional football, highway repair crews, Alaska fishing boat crews, Antarctic research bases, mountain climbing, rock climbing, shark filming, etc.) One could hypothesize that in most of the cases where prostituion is illegal the mix of motives includes not just a kind of puritanical "sex is evil" view of sex, but also perhaps as a way of awarding a franchise to a certain industry, by decreasing the availability of alternatives that they would not otherwise make a profit on. In the hypothetical case where it is intended to benefit certain industries one could easily imagine that to be the porn industry. If this were really happening, that would mean that the push to illegalize prostitution for supposedly moral reasons was in part in order to promote and maximize the profits of a different industry, porn, which many of the same supposedly moral people would also consider to be immoral. Another way to think about it is this way: if it were legal for everyone to be a prostitute, it would be very hard for a single company or group of companies to make a profit from that, because each individual can work freelance, and directly capture all or most of the income from their services. This theory, that the criminalization effort is in part to award a minority business interest, is one that I am not so sure of, because I think there are plenty of other strong theories that could account for it sufficiently. However, the general pattern I've seen with most government laws, both in the US and in other countries is "Thing X is bad/evil/unhealthy therefore we make it illegal. Exception in cases A, B and C where we can help ensure private profits to a limited number of special interests who have lobbied us and are scratching our backs behind the scenes. Then it's okay.". In other words, morality in the large print, but graft in the fine print. Therefore, not truly a moral stand. Therefore, hypocrisy. Hypocri-democracy?

Legalize Gambling
Gambling is 'bad' and therefore we make it illegal. Except in the places where we let it be legal (for example, in Colorado there are a few mountain towns where it's allowed; or in Las Vegas, or in a certain part of New Jersey), or, if a US state government is the entity providing the gambling service. WTF? Gambling is 'bad' and therefore illegal, unless it is a financial firm on Wall Street, then it's okay. Unless it's someone making an investment, and therefore taking a risk that he might lose his invested money entirely. Investment is a gamble. Many things in life are a gamble. Life is full of risk. Often when you minimize risk you also minimize reward. It's true there are differences between different kinds of gambling, bets and risk, and some give the bettor more control or information and some give less. If the argument is that, well, playing a slot machine is very different than playing Wall Street because the former is truly random and the latter has instead many fundamental mechanisms underpinning it which reduces actual risk, especially over the long term. That's true. I understand the argument that playing a slot machine is different than Wall Street, and therefore to protect people we make it illegal. Except they make it legal in some towns, states and countries. And therefore it's legal somewhere, so people can still do it, legally -- except when they can't. Arguably this is "legal theatre" and possibly another case where a government is not really making a moral stand but instead working to grant a legal monopoly to a certain set of private vendors, possibly with behind-the-scenes graft going on as well. How come I can't "gamble online" and yet I can go to a website and buy a share in some publically listed company, or buy pork futures, or buy a "collectors edition" version of some random plastic pop novelty trinket piece of junk. In each of the cases there is no guarantee you'll get a ROI, and you may just be pissing your money away.