Society (by alaric)
It's easy to sit and complain that Society Is Going To The Dogs, and hardly any harder to come up with somebody to blame (these days, immigrants and politicians are popular), and still well within the mental capacity of the average Daily Mail reader to come up with some satisfying-sounding radical proposals for what to do about it.
However, a society is a very complex system, and every change you make has complex consequences; nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Further complicating the situation is that any attempt to make your system of laws or government institutions more complex further complicates the analysis of subsequent changes; and, perhaps most pertinently, a society is not some beaker full of bubbling chemicals - the components of a society are sentient, some of them are even intelligent, and they are highly incentivised to make the best of their situation. In other words, people will figure out how to exploit systems, rather than working happily within the spirit of them.
People who are familiar with my approach to engineering solutions to problems will not be surprised to find that I suggest:
Forgetting all the cruft and historical baggage, and sitting down and carefully enumerating what you actually want from the system
Making the system as simple as possible (but no simpler), to reduce the scope for unexpected consequences
Using self-reinforcing negative feedback loops to maintain stability, while injecting noise to prevent stagnation in local maximae
So what do we want from a society?
I think a "society", as a construct somebody might actually engineer (by, for example, creating a government, but let's not jump ahead of ourselves here), can be thought of as a means of balancing the needs of individuals against each other.
I mean, in the absence of any kind of society, one might expect to find mindless bullying and warlordism, as well as a shortage of collective cooperative action towards projects that benefit every member of the group, yet cannot realistically be accomplished individually (eg, research, defending the society against other, antagonistic, societies and entities, etc).
So I think it's hardly controversial to suggest that a society is a good thing to have, and that the society should provide some mechanism to prevent individuals abusing power over others, and some mechanism to organise collective projects - flood defences, welfare systems, scientific research, transport networks, and so on.
Do we need a government?
I'm trying to avoid tainting the search for a solution with knowledge of what has gone before, as that tends to inhibit creative thinking. So I'm defining a "government" as some entity that, in its creation, attains some kind of power over the members of a society, and acts to maintain it, and (in theory at least) uses that power to compel individuals to act in ways that benefit the society as a whole.
Whether that means the government have armed police, or merely have a monopoly over some resource or service and withhold access to that from individuals who "break the rules" is up for debate. And whether the government is a hierarchy of people, a giant computer, or some emergent behaviour of the society is also left unspecified (for now).
So, do we need one? I'm going to hesitantly suggest "yes", because I can't think of any other reliable ways to hold a society together. I observe that in any group of people large enough for there to be "strangers", some people will exhibit selfish antisocial behaviour, such as robbing or bullying, even if it does not benefit them in the long term; I opine that over-extrapolated libertarian systems such as anarcho-capitalism lead to a loss of individual liberty due to people who managed to gain a "power advantage" over others using that to compel others to act in the interest of the advantage-holder rather than themselves, thereby increasing their power advantage, even if it is irrational to do so. I suspect that such systems would work if people were more rational, as the long-term costs of being hated (and, eventually, murdered in your sleep), and being in a generally weaker society due to the inefficiences your meddling produces (for yourself and your eventual descendants), will dissuade people from the tempting short-term gains of enslaving everyone you can and sending them down the pits.
So what's bad about governments as we have them now?
I think that contemporary democratic governments are mediocre. They seem to produce much nicer countries to live in than despotism, but mainly by virtue of being too ineffectual to effectively create a totalitarian regime; however, they still seem to try. The number of things that are illegal in a democracy seems to increase with time, and although that are not easily comparable, I have a hunch that the cost in individual happiness due to laws becoming more complicated and restrictive with time, in western democracies at least, is more than the improvements (if any) we see due to better government services.
Put another way, my experience of government has generally been shrinking liberties, rising taxes, reducing government services - and only the occasional, minor, improvement in government services.
This is perhaps no surprise, when you consider the pressures a government is under; it has to work hard just to get elected and then re-elected. The motivation to actually improve society is limited to the individual altruism of the politicians, and the pressure to create the maximum appearance of improvement to try and get re-elected. The former exists, but is limited by the more immediate urge to do things that sound good, and whose flaws won't be noticed, at least not until after the next general election.
I am not confident that democracy really produces what's best for the people. For a start, I don't think that parliamentary systems really produce the will of the people, due to the limited range of choices available in a vote; let alone the issue of the people actually knowing what's best for them, rather than choosing things that look like good ideas after a shallow analysis, informed only by the tabloid press. We do not vote for policies - we vote for people who we think will come up with good policies; and we judge them mainly on a sensationalised analysis of past performance. The choice of parties to vote for is hardly broad, and the voting system strongly discourages victory for any but the two most popular parties, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of tactical voting. We end up with a two-party system, and those two parties are under some pressure to become less and less distinguishable in practice, as they compete for the same set of "swing voters".
There's little argument that a parliamentary democracy presiding over a complex government sucks - but a more subtle question is whether we can do any better.
Do we need a ruling body?
Perhaps too much effort is put into worrying about the top-level ruling body of a government. Do we really need a king/parliament/president/triumvirate/soviet or whatever? There's an intuitive feeling that there needs to be some ultimate power to coordinate the actions of various different parts of a government, but I'm not actually convinced it'd be so bad to have totally independent "ministries" such as a legal system, a military, a treasury, and so on. The obvious issue is how to make sure the bodies actually work together (what motivation does the treasury have to actually give money to the other ministries, rather than just keeping it all?), but this boils down to the same problem of what motivates a government to act in the interests of the society, merely applied to each ministry individually. Each ministry could have its own democracy or whatever.
I've not done much detailed thinking about this yet. I suspect there will be a common objection along the lines of "How do you get decisive, rapid, action?", similar to the arguments I hear when I ask "So what's so bad about a hung parliament, anyway?"; but I question the need for a government to act fast. Sure, emergency services and the defense forces should act rapidly, but I question why the government itself shouldn't have to. Ok, in our current situation, we're feeling frustrated that the government is so broken that we wish it could change faster; but this is not a good steady state for a government to be in. I suspect that a government should, if it is well designed to begin with, change slowly in order to settle slowly towards a more optimal configuration, while reacting only very slowly and carefully to social changes resulting from development of new ideas and technologies - I would rather wait a decade for a copyright reform than have a terrible knee-jerk reaction to the recent disappearance of the cost of making perfect copies of media, for example.
Whether we have lots of ruling bodies with specific domains, or one (busier) central one, we still need to decide how such a ruling body works, though. Do we put everything out to referendum? That risks knee-jerk reactions fuelled by scaremongering sensationalist press. Do we have hereditary lords? They're unaccountable, although they do tend to take a longer-term view of things because of the hereditery. Do we elect politicians? They're largely concerned with trying to get re-elected, so are also prone to knee-jerk reactions fuelled by scaremongering sensationalist press, and are particulary loathe to do anythng with short-term costs whose benefits won't be visible before the next election, or without easily explained and visible benefits, and ill-defined subtle costs.
I think we should adopt a mixture of the above. Here's an idea to consider: have councils composed of a mixture of elected politicians, and randomly-selected members of the public, sort of like jury service (see the section about national service below for a prime source of candidates), and domain experts in the field the council is in charge of, selected via some process I've not fully decided yet (perhaps just picking some leading academics; make it part of holding a professorship or something). Avoid the silliness of "election time" by holding a vote to replace one elected member of the council a day, and replacing one of the jury per day; keep the domain experts around until they retire. Also, having three different groups present (aside from any party divisions amongst the elected members) will naturally tend to break up the human tendency to split into Us and Them. The two-sided structure of the House of Commons can't help here, and circular council rooms just tend to split into people to the left or right of some arbitrary point. So make the room triangular. See what subtle effect this has on the psychology of its occupants.
What about policing and law?
Systems of laws, and their enforcement arms (courts, police services and punishment services) exist to prevent individuals abusing their power over others.
However, there is a temptation to take the easy route and to remove individuals power over others. There is often much debate about whether to make posessing some power (be that the ownership of firearms, or the freedom of speech) at all to be illegal, or merely to make abusing it illegal; the argument in favour of total abolition is generally that the cost of deciding individual cases is too high, or that the temptation to abuse the power is too great, so we would be better off without it at all.
I dislike this trend, as I am a very responsible and considerate person, yet with a strong desire to experiment; I somewhat resent having powers that I would use wisely removed from me because others might not use them wisely.
But neither do I wish to live in a world where anybody can walk into a shop and walk out with a light support weapon.
A legal system depends on some way of deciding, as repeatably as possible, whether some action was justifiable or not. As the parties involved in the action may have vested interests in the decision going one way or another, giving that decision mechanism the ability to perform forensic analyses and research would seem necessary; and there is a good, although hardly irrefutable, argument that giving it access to special powers to violate the freedoms of involved parties in order to settle disputed arguments is worthwhile - in other words, court orders to force the divulsion of information, or to confiscate and analyse property. I think we strike a reasonable balance with the powers of courts in England, from what I have heard.
The powers of the police, and the nature of the punishment system, are a little more questionable.
There is an argument that the police should be given far-reaching powers to detain individuals, invade their privacy with searches and illicit surveillance, seize their property, and so on, under the condition that they use appropriate judgement to only use those powers when a strong suspicion of guilt exists, rather than preying on the innocent. Any system of deciding when the police can violate the freedoms of others will inevitably have false positives, as there will be situations where it is almost certain that some individual is about to commit a terrible atrocity, and confirmation is required before they can be apprehended, lest they be wrongly imprisoned, or in order to obtain incriminating information about their accomplices so a deeper-rooted network of organised crime can be unearthed; and sometimes such apparently definitely guilty individuals will turn out to be innocent. Such unpleasant situations must be avoided, yet if access to special powers is restricted too much, smart criminals will be able to keep their crimes unprovable, and continue to damage society with their selfishness. I suspect that a combination of requiring permission from an isolated body (eg, needing to have warrants approved by a magistrate), and generous compensation for the victims of wrongful targets of special powers (certainly, the subject of a wiretap that clears them of guilt should be informed of the fact and compensated for the loss of privacy, although perhaps this disclosure could be delayed for up to some maximum timeframe if there is a fear that knowledge of the presence of the wiretap becoming public might jeopardize the search for the real perpetrators). I think a general framework for this should be built into the legal system at a lower level than individual systems for individual special powers.
Do we need a police force at all? What about giving the entire populace access to special powers of enforcement, such as arrest? There would still be some argument for some people to be paid so that they can look for crime and enforce law professionally, purely to ensure adequate cover; but this decision might perhaps be made on a regional basis.
Who should decide what the laws are? I've spoken above of whether to give that job to a central ruling body, or to have a dedicated ruling body to decide on what law is. I think that thought should be given to engineering the long-term health of the law as a whole; just adding new laws, as any software engineer will tell you, creates increasing complexity and makes maintenance harder. I suspect there should be some motivation for the body in charge of the legal system to devote some effort to refactoring existing laws, generalising common elements into shared legal infrastructure, removing vestigial laws, and so on. Perhaps this can be enforced by requiring the body to organise the publication of a cross-referenced canonical reference to the entire system of laws at regular intervals; that will encourage them to think about more than just publishing new sets of laws.
I feel that the design of laws is definitely a long-term proposition, and not something to be left largely in the hands of people elected upon popular opinion for a four-year term. I think that not only the advice, but the approval, of domain experts should be required for the passage of a law; however, how to appoint domain experts (given inevitable political machinations where vested opinions will be attempting to influence the decision to appoint experts who have opinions sympathetic to the vested opinoins) is open to debate.
Whether case law is admissable is open to debate, but my hunch is that the cost savings in not having to decide everything from the written law every time, and the peace of mind in being able to examine case law to decide if a proposed action will be legal or not (rather than worrying about being called up before a court for it, and meeting an unsympathetic magistrate/judge/jury), is worth the cost of "bad" case law entering the system due to a poor decision, and needing risky overrulling through appeals.
But what powers do we give a court to resolve disputes? In civil cases, being able to order the parties in the dispute to act in a certain way to resolve their dispute is valuable and seems to work well in England, from my limited observations; but the penal system available to criminal courts is more debatable. Does putting people in prison help? It certainly removes dangerous people from society, but at a cost to the taxpayer and at the risk of turning prisons into training camps for criminal skills. Certainly the focus should be on keeping dangerous people away from potential victims, making their lives a bit unpleasant (so it's a deterrant, but not a scarring process that leaves them institutionalised, and to minimise the compensation that needs to be paid when wrongfully imprisoned people are released), and trying to teach them how to lead better lives.
The latter point being the most important. More on this below.
However, I think preventing crime in the first place is far more cost effective than too much effort invested in policing. Which leads us on to the welfare system.
What about a welfare system?
I think a welfare system is a good idea. The classic objection to this is "Why should I, a hard-working citizen who has made a success of my life, be paying to support failures?", but this misses one key point of a society: helping each other to succeed, so that together we have a better society to live in. Or, to put it more starkly: suppose somebody becomes unable to support themselves (be it due to being too naturally useless or lazy to earn a living - or due to being the victim of a natural disaster); do you really want them to be in a situation where there is a strong incentive for them to turn to crime, as the available punishments if they're caught don't look any worse than starving to death on the streets?
It's not just about altruism. Enlightened self-interest suggests there's a value in having a welfare system, too.
From an economic standpoint, it's worth noting that a free-market economy tends to make making money easier for people with more capital to invest in the first place. For a start, because if you have some money, you can always just invest it and reap a return. But more subtly, a person with a heap of savings, who needs a job, can take their time to find a good one, or to build a business with a reasonable starting investment. Somebody with nothing has to scrabble for the best job they can before they get kicked out of their home, so is much less likely to find a job that makes efficient use of their abilities, leading them to be short on money in future. Poverty is a vicious circle; not being able to afford insurance means you're doubly stuffed when the resources you depend upon to maintain your barely-breaking-even life fail you. Going from earning five hundred pounds a month too little to earning just enough is many, many, times harder than going from earning just enough to earning an extra five hundred pounds a month.
So given that a free market thrives when more individuals have more disposable income to spend on things, leading to more disposable incoming being available because the market is thriving, it's probably a worthwhile investment for people to help others out of poverty traps.
(I may be biased here, as I'm struggling my way out of a poverty trap myself, and the welfare system here is particularly useless. Please send cash so I can escape it and pursue my awesome business plans and make the world a better place. Thanks!)
Ok, so I've presented why I think a welfare system is a good idea - but at the same time, I think a welfare system that is open to abuse is a terrible idea, as it discourages people from actually earning money, which would actually contribute towards society. The British system is particularly notorious for the fact that people who are "on benefits" will tend to lose them if they earn even a small amount of money. They are actually in a situation where if they work, they will receive less income than if they sit around watching TV. That will make even rational altruistic people have to think twice about going and getting a job.
Also, there's the danger of people claiming benefits, then working and not reporting their extra income. This is kind of good in that they are actually working, thereby stimulating the economy, but they're then claiming benefits they may not deserve, draining the communal fund when it coule be spent better elsewhere. It's better than them not working at all, though, I suspect! Investigating and tracing down benefit fraud costs money, so putting more effort into catching "benefit cheats" may not actually save that much money in the long run.
I've heard an argument (sadly, I can't find the URL of the blog post now) for scrapping the whole concept of means-tested benefits, and just giving everyone a minimum tax-free wage calculated to be enough to survive off of, then increasing the rate of income tax to pay for it. The argument being that people might just sit and watch TV, but there's an incentive for them to work, because they get to keep the money (less tax); it doesn't disadvantage them. Society is saved the cost of maintaining a complex benefits infrastructure with means-testing and catching cheats, which will probably outweigh the fact that some people who are perfectly able to work might not bother because they're too lazy to even do a bit of work to earn some extra pocket money, so the amount that taxes need to be increased to pay for the welfare system probably turns out to be negative once the effect of being paid a minimum wage is taken into account, as the whole system is more efficient.
I think that's quite good reasoning (I like simple things!), but I'd like to go a step further. Rather than giving people money, just make the bare essentials of living free to everyone. Set up hostels where anybody can walk off of the street and get a bed in a dorm, a warm meal, a shower, the facilities to wash their clothes, and to swap their damaged or old clothes for some basic, standard, items?
The cost of providing this kind of thing in a centralised mass-produced way would be much lower than paying people cash to go and buy their own stuff. Also, people who are having trouble working for some reason might have trouble looking after themselves, so having a nutritious meal put in front of them might be for the best, rather than putting a few pounds in their pocket and pointing them towards the shopping district, where it might end up being spent on cigarettes, alcohol, or worse.
So it's probably going to be cheaper than giving people enough money to support themselves. And it's going to ensure that the welfare budget is actually spent on keeping people alive and healthy so they can sort their lives out. But it has other benefits, too; it's a useful public service for us all. Ever missed the last train home? That wouldn't be such an unpleasant situation if you could just go and kip in a hostel. People in abusive homes can just walk out and know they're not going to end up "on the streets".
Also, these places would be a natural place to colocate resources aimed to help people get back into employment - training, counselling, etc.
What about the economy?
I think that capitalism is a good starting point, but it also has one fatal flaw: it tends to promote the creation of monopolies.
Copyrights and patents regulate this a bit. Patents grant time-limited monopolies in exchange for the invention being disclosed at all, so when the patent expires, all can use it. This is good, but it's been put under pressure to be over-extended to things like software patents, where the nature of "invention" is a lot more tenuous. Also, some organisations obtain patents then don't use them, in order to suppress a technology that threatens their business model. Perhaps patents should be more like trademarks - if you don't actually use the technology in the patent, then you lose the patent.
Copyright, as a monopoly, has an expiry too; but the copyright term should be kept low. At the time of writing, there's a lot of rhetoric around that copyright terms should be extended, as it's unfair that people who have created works (particularly music) lose the exclusive right to income from that after a while. However, I suspect it's more unfair that they expect to continue to earn from it long after having done the actual work. Get on and make more new things!
But what can we do to prevent the kinds of monopolies where a company just gets so big that it has the resources to prevent competition touching it; benefitting from economies of scale, having cash reserves to beat them in price wars, having more to spend on marketing and research so they keep ahead? Well, I think that the root issue here is companies getting too large. Is that really a good thing? Perhaps the tax system, and company law, should make the efficiency of a company decrease as it grows, and make that apply to groups of companies too so it can't be trivially circumvented. I'm skeptical about the benefit of "manual" intervention in monopolies, as I think it's ineffectual due to being prone to ending up in multi-year court cases due to the subtleties involved. At what point does sensible business practice become "anti-competitive"?
I think it's important to encourage small businesses to start and survive, though. Entrepreneurship is the driving force behind technical innovation these days, and contributes strongly to a healthy economy, and acts to destroy monopolies by pulling the market out from under their feet with an innovative new product. Small companies are agile; use the size of the big companies against them.
What should the individual's obligation to Society be?
Well, the obvious one is taxes. A court system and laws are very useful things, but they require hiring people to run them. Having a dedicated police force versus leaving it to concerned citizens to catch criminals is an interesting debate, but I think there'll be a need for at least some professional police, if only due to a shortage of volunteers, or to ensure adequate police cover for when trouble is expected (football matches?). A public health service is probably a good idea. It would be nice to not require armed forces, but depending on what your neighbours are like, there may be a requirement to repel armed invaders. It's debatable whether using military might to ensure your national interests are met abroad is appropriate in this enlightened age, even if veiled under the pretense of toppling a despot for the good of humanity, but I can see some weight in the argument; I suspect, being a contentious point, it should be opened up to the free market and funded from charitable donations rather than being paid for out of taxes, however.
I can imagine some taxless systems (for example, the government controls the currency supply, and just prints money when it wants it, indirectly taxing people who hold cash-based assets via inflation), but I don't see them as being much better than just charging people to live in your society. I think it needs to be clear that's what's happening, though; taxes are a kind of rental fee for your place in society. Taxes are also used as a form of control, though; high taxes are placed on alcohol, tobacco, and fuel to discourage people from buying them. Personally, I think a tax system should be kept simple, so there's less burden on people to pay their taxes, and less scope for people to try and fiddle them, thereby creating a complex enforcement infrastructure.
Taxes on transfers of value should work like VAT - a flat percentage rate, with simple rules for working out what rate (if any) should be paid on that transaction. Make inheritance tax, income tax, sales tax, and corporation tax all into one simple tax, and you'll save a lot of pain, I reckon. You're not charging people based on their actual usage of communal resources, though - there's an argument to charge everyone the same flat rate, but I think there's a much stronger argument to charge people based on what they can afford (which we can measure by how much they're spending, by making the tax be a flat percentage rate on transactions).
Having a decent welfare system removes the need to make the tax system work as a welfare system, too. There's no need for complex tax breaks for the poor if the welfare system covers poverty. Nor for reducing or removing sales tax on "essentials", leading to daft "Cake or Biscuit?" court cases. Keep things simple, and if there are edge cases, fix your simple system rather than slapping complexities into it.
But, perhaps controversially, I believe there's a place for a system of "national service". For a start, I don't think it should be immediately associated with the military - I think that it should lead to any of a number of jobs within the government. I think there is great educational value in working as part of a team on projects that benefit society as a whole. Also, it can act as a great leveller - the jobs should only require basic skills, so people would be allocated to jobs randomly (apart from when disabilities limit the options available, and subject to people objecting to, eg, offensive military action on ethical grounds). You'll end up in a random part of the country, with people from all sorts of cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. You'll get paid (on top of the fact that your living costs will be zero; we have a hostel-based welfare system), and you'll be trained to do a number of jobs as you are rotated between teams on a suitable timescale (six months? a year?), so you get to do a few things in your two- or three- year term. You'll come out of this having tasted employment, and with worke xperience to put on your CV, and having made friends from very different backgrounds to yourself.
Being forced to do this is a loss of liberty, and for people who don't benefit from it because they've found the same benefits elsewhere, it's a waste of a few years of their life. However, it is bounded, so even if it's a total waste of time, once it's over, it's over.
I think this will do a great deal, however, to reduce the problems of ghettoisation. Currently, people who grow up on troubled housing estates, amongst crime and social collapse, rarely escape that world. This prevents them from contributing to society, and causes costs to society due to the crime.
That worries me more than losing a couple of years of my life.
What about immigration?
Many countries are worried about immigration. The problem generally boils down to "These people are taking our jobs!" or "These people are coming into the country with no skills, so are ending up being drains on the welfare system as they can't get jobs!".
I don't get the "taking our jobs" angle. How are the immigrants getting an unfair advantage in competing for jobs? How are they "taking" them? I have no idea how I'd take a French person's job if I moved to France.
What seems to be happening is that the immigrants are happier to work on poorly-paid jobs with short contract terms than British people, due to having lower living expenses, perhaps entirely due to having lower expectations of quality of life.
This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. A cheap labour pool is a resource, people. If you're worried there's too many people competing for jobs, then go and start a business that does something useful, and hire these people cheaply, and thereby make money. You now have a job running this company!
Part of the problem, in the UK at least, possibly stems from the combination of minimum-wage laws that make it hard to actually use a cheap labour pool (thereby crippling businesses that need people to do simple things; if you have to pay them minimum wage, then you might as well hire more skilled people to do more skilled work that you can get more value from), and a past decision to make university education the norm for children who grow up in the country, with a view to moving towards a more service-industry-based economy full of white-collar workers. I'd be inclined to let the laws of supply and demand manage the distribution of white-collar vs. blue-collar employment, and have a decent welfare system rather than a minimum wage.
If people coming into your country is considered a problem rather than a resource to be used to make cool things, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your economy, and you need to find it and fix it.
Of course, perhaps the real problem behind people worrying about immigration is racism, which certainly seems to be what the gutter press exploit in their sensationalist "Immigrants get benefits and free houses while honest British workers starve!" stories.
Practicalities
The thing is, converting a country like the UK to a radically different system, such as I have proposed, would be fairly impractical as things stand. There's a lot of inertia to overcome. It would be far beyond the powers of our political parties to do such a radical thing.
So, assuming we like my ideas for how to structure a better society (although I'm mindful that I've focussed on the issue of government above, rather than other, subtler, social experiments I'm also interested in), how might we ever realise them?
This is a design for a large nation, the sort that are currently recognised in the field of international politics. Micronations of ten families on a seastead have a very different nature, and would probably naturally tend towards traditional Communism, with personal liberty generally focussed on being able to leave and join a different community if you don't like this one, but the "economy" otherwise being rigidly controlled and due to the necessities of sharing a small collective living structure, with anarcho-capitalism between the micronations.
Which may be no bad thing - anarcho-capitalism isn't quite so scary if you're in a group of friends who can watch each other's backs. It's probably more practical to bootstrap, out in international waters, than trying to change a nation of millions of people.
Sat 3rd Jul 2010 12:12 am 
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By J Doe, Sat 3rd Jul 2010 @ 11:52 am
Interesting post.
Your hostel idea reminded me of the function the YMCA served years ago.