site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My father was was appointed mayor of Nampa, Idaho. Nampa is in the Boise Metro, it's Idaho third largest city at around 110,000 people. R+20. He's only gonna be in office for a year an a half, doesn't plan on running after.

What would be the most impactfully policies he could pursue.

Of course he probably won't listen to me, and the city council certainly won't listen. Parks and Rec is more real than people think...

Your dad spells his name weird

He looks like he could knock back a 13 pack and make pancakes for the grandkids at 7am

I would say go for remembrance - just start going HAM on slightly illogical trees all over the town … think flowering bonsai for the climate

Pick a country and just blow it up - make it a big Croatian city … no one has anything bad to say about those people so he could sneak it past everyone in a kind of well, ok way

Make moats legal

Introduce a new species into the environment

Start a communism based farm but make it alpacas

Hummus Tuesday

Subsidized firearm for everyone that turns 18

Not sure where we'll get the ordinance to blow up Rijeka but cities are about the same size so fair fight.

Well it's pronounced like Carl, with a D. It's less often now since he's lived in Nampa for decades but growing up 50% of people would pronounce his name wrong and he never corrected anyone. Because of that I've always found it odd people who make a big deal about pronouncing their names correctly.

Hasn't touched a drop of alcohol since college, but from stories its sounds like he could put some down back in the day. He makes pancakes for his grand kids all the time.

We actually didn't have rats in the valley until a couple years ago. While native - I've never heard of one in the city - Fish and Game tranquilized a bear out of a tree in town last week.

This is half-facetious but... is there any way to address how bad Nampa sometimes smells? We have casually considered moving there from Boise but we're afraid we'll accidentally end up somewhere that reeks when the wind comes from the right direction.

Also half-facetious... It's a federal problem end all agricultural subsidies and the sugar beet industry will collapse taking the the sugar beet factory with it.

Thirty years ago there were three big problems Amalgamated, the meat packing plant, and sewage processing. The three of them were spaced around the city so that you could get a smell any wind direction. The meat plant is gone, the city has and is dumping a ton of money into water treatment, and the sugar beat factory has had several rounds of of projects to mitigate the smell. Now, I only notice a sugar beat factory sporadically during the fall beet campaign if the conditions are just right, and I'm relatively close. So yes, don't buy a house next to the factory (granted that means farther from the freeway), but 90% of the town is now fine with only a few days a year where you might get a whiff.

While it pains me to say, if I was going to move back to that side of the valley I'd probably look at Caldwell. I think downtown Caldwell is far superior to downtown Nampa now. I haven't looked at how worse the gang issues are, but no matter what it pales in comparison to the late 90's early '00s.

Primary concern being my real name being tied to this place in any way? I thought about it - I would prefer the admins not put my main on blast - if we start woke struggle sessions being the son of my father will probably be the most problematic in and of itself.

Maybe his father did Elon-style parenting before it was cool.

Provide support for K-12 math competitions. Practice space without fees or burdensome regulations, funding for team registrations, equal treatment of public/private/homeschoolers. There’s plenty of local talent to coach the stuff between Micron and BSU. There would be negligible travel costs for anyone making it to a state-level competition since that’ll run in the Boise area anyway.

Probably the most important thing he could do is to pick a single (currently) nonpartisan, nonsalient bugbear that never the less causes unambiguous quantifiable harm and go after it with the fury of a thousand suns. For example, there's been some pretty decent research lately that shows that high CO2 levels reduce educational attainment, so he could make improving school HVAC systems a central priority. Compared to something grand like "fixing immigration" it probably sounds pointless, but remember that expected value is a joint consequence of how effective an intervention is and HOW LIKELY IT IS TO HAPPEN! There is almost certainly tons of low-hanging fruit lying around, because politicians typically prefer to expend all their time on salient and therefore voter-grabbing issues.

Such thinking is why I came here! Trying to identify such issues. Granted my proclivities are for less spending.

Oof, reducing spending is much harder than reallocating it. my impression of american municipal governments is that they're both fairly efficient and the "waste" that exists is fairly load-bearing. You could cut money from the parks and rec budget, but that will be immediately salient to the people who use those parks. Cancelling a local festival will infuriate more people than it's worth. And anyways, your biggest line items are probably police budgets and road maintenence, and those are a terrible mix of highly salient and very opaque.

The best he can probably do is probably fuck around with your city's zoning/building codes to reduce how hard+expensive it is to get new stuff approved and built. The direct savings will be pretty small or even negative (if you have to hire more bureaucrats to process stuff faster.) But time is money, so a complicated permitting process is effectively a tax on building new things, and therefore a tax that gets spread out over everyone who uses those new things in the subsequent years. Maybe there's some minor occupational licensing stuff your dad can make easier too?

Agreed on thr housing stuff. Zoning is probably the single most powerful tool for effective change at the hands of a municipal government. Pushing through a modest reform to Loosen zoning, making it cheaper and quicker to build stuff (especially housing) is the most imprtant thing a random mayor is likely going to be able to accomplish. Most of our current societal ills are ultimately downstream of the fact that nobody but retired boomers can afford to buy a house.

Annex the Caldwell LDS Temple. Rename it the Nampa Temple.

Why not just go for Meridian's? Then Nampa could retake 2nd largest city and have just as weird borders as Meridian.

Congrats to your dad!

Most of the complaints I'm seeing are about traffic. Is it that bad?

I'll be driving from Boise proper to Nampa this evening. I have to arrive at 5:30, which means I need to leave at 4:20, though it would be a 25 minute drive with no traffic. Whether or not that constitutes "that bad" likely depends on where you are from, but for an Idahoan, it feels outrageous!

I'm super stoked for him. His exit from his career came with less recognition than I felt he deserved, largely stemming from his stances on COVID policy vs. those of his bosses. This feels like his just recognition for all the work he did for 30 years.

In my opinion no, I'd challenge anyone to point to a city in a similar position with materially better traffic. Granted Mayor Dale (mayor for 24) put in a very odd traffic pattern in the middle of downtown that we all complain about, but that's getting fixed, and at best will save people a few minutes.

He can increase public awareness on a variety of important topics: that increasing school funding doesn’t work; that hiring post-bachelors teachers is actually harmful, let alone unnecessary, for increasing performance in schools; that you can download free books on libgen and free scientific articles on sci-hub; that IQ should be a permissible factor in hiring; that corporations should consider bypassing the university system and just hire promising high school students; stuff like that. Just break through the Overton Window like the kool-aid man. Do it on live television.

I like it, but ambitious. While we’re at it, might as well add sharing IQ, FBI crime, and racial in-group preference statistics to the list.

You’ve really got a boner for chaos don’t you? “But that would be too inconvenient for our ideology.”

He sent me to a private school, that regularly had none accredited teachers, and per student spending less than the public schools. Nampa has started closing schools, many transplants have been retirees and those with families have trended towards moving outside the district, homeschooling, and private schools.

Nampa, Idaho’s fourth largest school district, has seen enrollment plummet in recent years. Since the 2013-2014 school year, enrollment has gone from nearly 15,000 students to less than 13,000 this year. That may be surprising to some, considering the city’s population has nearly doubled this century. But school district leaders in recent weeks have described a series of factors leading to declining enrollment. For one, many Nampa newcomers are older and don’t have school-aged children. Additionally, housing development has focused on the outskirts of Nampa, outside the district’s boundaries. While the Vallivue School District to the west is growing, Nampa schools are shrinking. And school leaders expect the downward trend to continue. Nampa’s current kindergarten class size is 841 students, down from 1,239 a decade ago.

What would be the most impactfully policies he could pursue.

Deport all the Californians and Oregonians.

California is mostly a red state outside of the Bay Area and urban coastal centers. As a California native born and raised, believe me when I tell you there are plenty of Californians on one side of the fence who intensely dislike the Californians on the other side.

With the right policies can just incentivize self deportation. Go beyond Greenleaf and subsidize gun ownership for all heads of household.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats