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Sorry for the late reply. I don’t know. I don’t think the aim of math is correspondence to physical facts like in science. But maybe it’s correspondence to mathematical facts.

Since this criticism (having to pay federal income tax) is true of any US state, I wouldn’t hold it against Nevada specifically unless you wish to rule out the US as a whole.

What’s wrong with fluoride?

I’ve heard good things about New Hampshire in this regard. I think they have no compulsory schooling.

… I am for eating food that grows without human intervention.

I don’t think that’s possible unless you go deep into a forest somewhere and eat some wild berries you find (which is dangerous anyway). You’d die trying.

GMOs are a marvel of food engineering. But ‘GMO’ as a concept isn’t coherent anyway since people have been genetically modifying foods through selective breeding for millennia. There’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. That’s a good thing. For example, ‘natural’ bananas are a pain in the ass because they have seeds you need to remove before eating. Those bananas are also tiny. https://youtu.be/VRbITN4qlRs?t=121

You seem to think that whatever’s ‘natural’ is good. That’s not the case. I think you’d do well to avoid organic foods and specifically seek out GMO foods:

https://news.immunologic.org/p/gmos-and-genetic-engineering-are

GMOs are great outside of mass starvation, too. If we can genetically modify foods to be better for us, why wouldn’t we?

I have implemented 1-4. Give it a try. I think 5 is out of scope for now but I may revisit it at some point. If auto-closing asterisks are a problem at the start of a line (when making lists), use a hyphen instead.

On second thought, implementing a proper text editor would take more work than I initially realized, and is far beyond the scope of what Benjamin is requesting anyway. I can revisit this idea later.

I can take this opportunity to replace manual markdown with a proper text editor. Then there’s no need for autopaired brackets.

The editor will need to support:

• Automatic links to ideas like #123
• Links to @mentions like @dennis-hackethal
• Safe link formatting
• Disabling of turbo links
• Namespaced footnotes
• Custom blockquote format
• Protection against XSS
• Retention of formatting when pasting

I can take this opportunity to replace manual markdown with a proper text editor. Then there’s no need for autopaired brackets.

The editor will need to support:

• Automatic links to ideas like #123
• Links to @mentions like @dennis-hackethal
• Safe link formatting
• Disabling of turbo links
• Namespaced footnotes
• Custom blockquote format
• Protection against XSS

… it is simply a matter of tradition.

Another answer suggests that “We are following a tradition that came from British law of having trials decided by volunteers…” (emphasis mine).

So while having a jury may be tradition, the force part might not be tradition but relatively new.

Making something voluntary doesn’t necessarily make it a profession. I buy sandwiches voluntarily, that doesn’t mean I work in that field.

Well, at least this response is an honest confession of one of the (potentially) true motivations behind jury duty…

It’s not clear to me that force is cheaper. On the contrary, force causes friction. Dealing with people who don’t want to be there results in additional overhead that may be hidden/not reflected in numbers.

[Force is] cheaper than paying jurors their market rate for their time.

Source

Force reduces legitimacy because there’s a greater risk of abuse and bias in jury selection.

Voluntary choice makes the process more legitimate, not less.

The same issue comes up with conscription, say: there’s honor in defending your country voluntarily, if you decide it deserves defending. But if you’re forced to defend it regardless, your efforts aren’t a reflection of merit or legitimacy anymore.

Take the POV of a third party from another country. Let’s say you’re European and you observe, from afar, the US being attacked by a foreign adversary. You also observe millions of Americans signing up the next day to defend America. That would mean something. Europeans could note this development as proof that America has values that are worth defending. But if Americans were instead conscripted, this signal would be lost.

I think the best justification is legitimacy: people accept a court decision better if it was made by their peers, instead of a government employee. That is important in places where the government is not trusted, or trustworthy.

Source

Making juries voluntary doesn’t mean getting rid of them.

Trial by jury has been central to English Common Law legal systems “since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” So you could say it is simply a matter of tradition.

Source

It’s still arbitrary if it doesn’t address your objections. That’s a violation of consent and thus irrational.

If the legislature approves, doesn’t that mean the force is not arbitrary? Since whatever they decide goes through an objective approval process.

By that logic, the government could arbitrarily force you to do anything the legislature approves of.

The difficulty of finding volunteers alone means that jury duty must be mandatory.

Not necessarily. It might just mean that courts are bad at persuading people to be jurors.

… if it were voluntary, it wouldn’t be fair for those who did serve.

By that ‘logic’, America never could have abolished slavery because freeing the next generation would have been ‘unfair’ to slaves. What a stupid argument.