Nudity and Pornography

The puritanical idea that we must convince our children that sex does not exist, and that a naked body is sinful, is unsustainable. Asymmetry in indecent exposure precedent is perhaps not measurably bad for the country (as abstinence-only sex education is) but it is certainly awkward and pointless. For most adults in this country, sex - even recreational sex - is a regular part of life. Premarital sex is nearly universal and nearly all sexually active women have used contraception.

I'll accept that genitals ought to be covered. It's probably justifiable from a hygiene angle. But mandating that a woman's nipples must be covered is, as far as I can tell, nonsense. It's certainly incorrect to have gender asymmetry in the rule; the idea that a female nipple is more sexual than a male nipple is hard to justify. If you're unconvinced, try to tell which sex each of these nipples belongs to.



(Just a heads up - be careful about putting "nipple" into a Google image search; apparently nipple enlargement, nipple torture, and giant nipple piercings are pretty popular on the internet.)

Furthermore, if our goal is to protect children from explicit material, banning the female nipple is a really bad way to do it (of course it is generally easy to tell if a picture contains a female nipple; you'll notice that discussing complex issues as if they're black and white is a recurring pet peeve of mine). For example, you'll notice that of the four images below, three have exposed nipples. The first is art. The second is educational, helping teach how to do a self breast exam. The third, breastfeeding, I had to modify because a Google bot flagged it as pornographic. However, only the last image, "Sexy Bikini Girl," who has her nipples covered, is undeniably sexual.




And though this should go without saying, acknowledging that a nude body is not inherently dirty is not the same as insisting that everyone be naked all the time. Men are free to bare their entire torsos in public but few do. When not constrained by laws we are still constrained by practicality.

This is of course not to say that a naked body cannot be sexual; it obviously can be. But nudity is not inherently pornographic and it should not be censored as if to see it is shameful. Like comprehensive sex education, the stigma associated with pornography comes from the religious notion that we must be sexually pure. This is completely irreconcilable with reality.

According to surveys, only a quarter think pornography is protected under the First Amendment, just over a third think it's "morally acceptable to look at pictures of nudity or sexually explicit behavior," while 82% of adults think that laws against online obscenity should be "vigorously enforced." Meanwhile, back in fact land, one in four web searches is for pornography, one in ten emails is pornographic, half of all online spending is pornographic, and thirty million Americans - about one sixth of online users at the time - access online porn per day. Two thirds of men between 20 and 40 admit to looking at online porn regularly, as do a third of churchgoing women. These figures are from 2005, but you get the idea.

Shame over the sexual act is obsolete. Kinsey showed us sixty years ago that just about everyone is sexual; there comes a point where you can no longer act surprised and indignant.

That said, pornography is overwhelmingly aimed at men. It portrays sex as a male-dominated, even misogynistic, act. This is a norm I don't think we should accept as a culture. However, that's hard to change, as I imagine that porn production is market driven. And with annual porn revenues conservatively at ten billion dollars (in 2005), producers have a pretty big sample as far as gauging what sells.

(The nipples were all male.)

Pokemon Types

Pokemon is a pop culture phenomenon (primarily a video game but also made television series, movies, playing cards, toys, and so on) in which you capture monsters and battle them for sport and profit. Five generations of Pokemon games have been released for Gameboy and each has been a top selling game; the popularity of the franchise has ingrained Pokemon into our pop culture lexicon.

And that's great - the game has broad appeal, high replay value, and is more fun when played with friends. However it's doubtless that the core of the Pokemon game is battling Pokemon. And the type system by which that happens is, in hindsight, inelegant.

Each Pokemon has one or two elemental types inherent to its species. Additionally, each Pokemon can learn up to four attacks, each of which has an elemental type. Pokemon need not learn attacks of their own type, though they receive a bonus for doing so.

These types are crucial to making Pokemon battles interesting. For example Charizard is a fire- and-flying type Pokemon. Suppose my Charizard knows Fire Blast, Wing Attack, Scratch, and Bubblebeam. It will receive an attack bonus every time it uses Fire Blast or Wing Attack, but no bonus for the other two. Furthermore, Fire Blast will be super effective (double damage) against an ice-type Pokemon, but not very effective (half damage) against a rock-type Pokemon. On the other hand Bubblebeam, a water-type attack, will give Charizard no bonus by itself but will be super effective against a rock-type Pokemon.

The idea of having types interacting with each other adds significant depth to battles, but we see awkwardness in the types themselves.

The first issue is grammatical. I do not think it's unreasonable to expect that all elemental types be nouns (as most of them are). Some of the problem types even suggest an obvious choice; flying may as well be air or wind and electric could be lightning or electricity. There are a few more offenders, though I'll touch on those later as I look at other issues.



There are too many types. In total there are seventeen Pokemon types (initially there were only fifteen but dark and steel were added for balance reasons after the first generation of games). That means that in order to keep the game at a manageable level of complexity, on average a type will have no interaction with about two thirds of the other types. With fewer types we could have a less sparse interaction matrix. Some types have strong flavor overlap with one another; for example rock and ground or bug and grass. And some types are just bad from a creative standpoint.

For example, bug and dragon aren't elements; they're kinds of animal. The type itself constrains what the Pokemon can look like. Furthermore, Charizard and Gyarados show pretty clearly that a Pokemon can look like a dragon without being dragon-type. There are plenty of Pokemon shaped vaguely like a lizard, a fish, a bird, and so on without needing lizard, fish, or bird types. But in practice the existence of a bug type means that if any Pokemon wants to be bug-shaped it must be saddled with that type, depriving it of a spot that could have a real element. Particularly given the near-nonexistence of bug- or dragon-type attacks it seems to me that these types might as well not exist.

Similarly, the fighting type is awkward because it mandates that a Pokemon of that type be a close human analog. Fighting-type attacks are generally kicks and punches, so fighting-type Pokemon must have feet and fists.

The normal type is Pokemon that have no elemental proclivity. It's also the type that goes along with early attacks like Tackle and Scratch. It's basically the boring type that you encounter early on in the game then move past. I would advocate merging the fighting and normal types, perhaps call the new type strength or muscle. This seems fine thematically; it was never obvious how a punch could be super effective against something resistant to tackling.

The psychic, ghost, and dark types all feed on the same general theme of creepiness; they certainly don't need three distinct types. Psychic has a decent lexicon of moves but ghost has few. Dark moves tend to just correspond to fighting dirty (stealing their items, sucker punching, fake crying) which is thematically questionable. Perhaps one new type (shadow? darkness?) could replace the three together.

Of course merging types throws off game balance in a significant way, so the entire type interaction chart would need some reworking. But that's fine, because it's got issues too.

Some existing types are pretty noninteractive. Only ice- and dragon-type attacks are super effective against dragon-type Pokemon, and dragon-type attacks are super effective against nothing else. Electric, a common Pokemon type, is weak against only ground, a pretty rare attack type. Dark-types also rarely have to worry about weaknesses; rather than having to weigh the pros and cons of having a Pokemon of that type, it's more a matter of using one as soon as you can find it.

No types are mutually weak to one another. It's an option for an interesting game dynamic that simply doesn't exist. One might expect, for example, that water would be super effective against electricity and vice versa; when you drop a toaster in the aquarium it's bad for the fish of course (electricity super effective against water) but it's also bad for the toaster... and your home wiring (water super effective against electricity). The closest Pokemon comes to that is having dragon-type be super effective against dragons, but you already know how I feel about that type.

We would perhaps expect the type setup would be inelegant if it were carried through from the first generation of games, before the Pokemon franchise was swimming in money. But it wasn't. After the first generation the steel and dark types were added to address balance issues. Some other weaknesses and resistances were modified as well. It seems to me that makes criticism reasonable.

Chart from Bulbapedia

Science and Christianity

In the claims that it does make, science is outstandingly reliable. Our systemic use of observation to deduce patterns of reality has been honed over centuries. Science uses mathematically rigorous analysis of data and review by experts to separate reputable theories from crackpots. A consensus by the scientific community is not earned lightly. To dispute such a consensus on an ideological basis is intellectually dishonest. It is the worst of religion; using deception to exert control over the uneducated.

There would be no conflict if the Bible made no testable claims, concerning itself only with parables and philosophies (though we would perhaps still be wrestling with the misogyny, bigotry, and sense of entitlement it can easily be used to promote). But that's not the case. The Bible lists the age of the universe on the order of thousands of years. The entire creation story is full of holes if taken literally. The Bible strongly implies that the earth is stationary - and by some readings flat - while the sun revolves around it. It tells of a sudden recent global flood. The list goes on and on with testable (and disproven!) natural claims in the Bible. And there is an entire political movement that revolves around getting these stories equal representation in our science classrooms.

The analogy that comes to mind would be if science textbooks included passages where they claimed that Jesus was a prostitute, then, through legislation and propaganda, threw a tantrum on a national scale when Christians declined to include those lessons in Sunday school. As Asimov said, "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

It seems to me that if science and Christianity are to coexist in harmony, rather than acting as foils to one another, each must respect the expertise of the other. Christianity must defer to accepted science even if it conflicts with a claim made in the Bible. The idea that ancient texts can trump evidence when considering knowledge of the natural world is unacceptable. Relatedly, scientific cannon speaks nothing of the supernatural. It is certainly not a problem that some scientists are also outspoken on the topic but in those cases we must insist that our arguments be coherent and intelligible rather than ignorant and embarrassing.

Of course the reason that critique of science is different from critique of Christianity is that they're different kinds of knowledge. In a religious context, no matter what I believe, as long as I'm respectful and articulate my opinion gets a spot at the religious pluralism table. Others may even learn from me. In science there is a right answer and we drive towards it (see this story by Asimov to understand why science is valuable even if we're not right yet). We use peer review to drive towards consensus. Once we have a solid grasp of something - for example evolution, the basis for modern biology - significant evidence is needed to make an argument against it. This is just not the case when discussing faith,  as it's personal rather than evidence-based.

Another distinction is that Christianity makes explicit recommendations for how society ought to be run. There is a significant population that views the Bible as an infallible document mandating bigotry and misogyny. As a result there are those who speak out against religion as an institution. There isn't really an analogous situation with science; while being educated in science can help us make lifestyle choices, science itself is knowledge, not prescriptions. If you're educated in the underlying science you can critique the prescriptions; it's hard to do the same for Christianity without unraveling the faith structure.

Dawkins is probably the scientist most well known for speaking out against religion. He insists that we understand the universe well enough to posit the nonexistence of God. It basically comes from Occam's Razor. We have an understanding of the universe that does not require the existence of a creator God; in fact the existence of such a being with the power and will to suspend the laws of reality demands that we add significant complexity to our model with no supporting evidence. We are compelled to accept the least complicated hypothesis that can explain all observed phenomena. To me this seems like a very elegant argument, and about as sciencey as you can get when discussing something which by definition cannot be observed.

(The other side of that coin is the plausibility argument - there are an awful lot of parameters that have been tuned just right to allow life to exist in the universe. Had the speed of light, the matter/antimatter ratio, and the amount of dark matter in the universe been off by even a small amount from Big Bang parameters it's likely that we wouldn't have planets, much less life. This argument doesn't do much for me, though, as it's just the anthropic principle; if the universe weren't suitable for life, nobody would be around to notice.)

(Of course Dawkins is known not only for being an outspoken against belief in God in the abstract but also for opposing the effect of religion on society. That'll have to wait for another post, as it's certainly a deep topic. My favorite resource on the topic is a debate between Hitchens and Tony Blair.)

We can have conversations about God. And we can have conversations about science. But, no matter how important an ancient text is to you, it should only ever be a part of one of those conversations.

Centuries ago Galileo was ostracized for teaching a revolutionary new astrometric model despite that fact that it matched observations better than the church-approved model; centuries later that's still used as an example of the church's fallibility. Now the evangelical church is fighting to keep evolution and climate change - topics which have been well accepted by experts worldwide for decades - out of American schools while the rest of the world facepalms.

Free Will and Consciousness

Free will is an interesting topic which carries significant religious baggage and has been a focal point of philosophical thought for centuries. Intuitively it seems to us that we have the free will to make choices but upon closer inspection it becomes less obvious.

The brain is a machine that operates according to the laws of physics. The complexity of the brain is very high - it's certainly not understood fully - but we know how big neurons are and how they communicate. And at those length and time scales we would not expect quantum mechanics to be relevant; that is, we would expect the behavior of the brain (and, by extension, the entire physical self) to be a deterministic result from sensory input.

(Of course quantum mechanics introduces perfect randomness, so that doesn't give you free will anyway, but it would at least be somewhere to start.)

Now the way we test whether this is the case is as follows. I give you the choice between chocolate and strawberry ice cream. You choose one. Then I rewind the universe and ask you the exact same question in the exact same environment while your brain is in the exact same state, over and over again. If you choose chocolate every single time, your brain is deterministic; otherwise you have free will.

Unfortunately this test is not possible, for obvious reasons. And the brain is far too complex for us to assemble a perfectly controlled test without time travel. Barring significant advances in brain-related technology, testing free will in any conclusive way is a bust. There plenty of science trying to inch towards understanding free will, of course, but studies are extremely limited in scope. In general they aim to influence or predict the subconscious actions of an individual.

Since there's no known physical or biological mechanism by which we could reasonably expect free will to arise, its existence is starting to seem unlikely.

This seems strange, at least at an intuitive level, because we are conscious beings (I am at least!). I can process information and make decisions. I can choose to take particular actions. If you ask me a question I can think about it, consciously come to a conclusion, and use my mouth and lungs to tell you the answer.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, nobody has a clue why that is. In an academic context consciousness doesn't seem to be well defined (which is unsurprising as it's inherently subjective). Studies regarding consciousness, like those regarding free will, seem more or less in line with tests of the limits of subconscious behavior. That leaves me feeling not much closer to an answer, but at least I'm feeling like I've come up with a good question:

I am conscious, whether or not I can rigorously explain to you what that means. Is there some mechanism by which my consciousness exerts control over my body? Or is my consciousness a by product of a complex but deterministic machine?

Healthcare

The USA has a bad health system. That's a fact. Among developed nations we rank poorly with regard to obesity, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Yet we pay significantly more per person than any other country on earth (if measuring as a fraction of GDP instead of per capita, only East Timor edges us out). As a culture it would be of significant benefit to emulate the successes of our allies rather than be stuck on pride and partisan ideology.

Sweden is one example of a healthcare system much better than ours. Despite being a supposed European socialist hellhole, their system is significantly more efficient. Private insurance exists for those who want to buy it but the government is the main healthcare provider.

Details of their system aside (those can be found, at length, on Wikipedia) Sweden's healthcare system costs 9% of their GDP (this is a typical number for a developed nation). This has been stable for decades. The state pays for approximately 97% of medical costs including, in some cases, lost wage due to illness, and transportation to a medical facility. There is a limit to the health care fees that can be accumulated by an individual over the course of a year ($360, which includes prescription drugs, tests, and visits to a specialist); the rest is covered by the government. You can see any doctor in the country and collect a prescription at any pharmacy. Waiting times are guaranteed to be no more than three days for a primary care physician or ten for a specialist.

On the other hand 17% of the United States GDP is spent on healthcare, and the rate has been rising for decades (it was about 10% in 1980 and is expected to hit 20% around 2020). The government covers about half of healthcare costs total, though how that's distributed is extremely uneven. Insurance rates are rising faster than wages or inflation. Which health care facility can be visited depends on the private insurance carrier. One out of six Americans has no health insurance at all (in fact we're the only wealthy nation that does not ensure that all citizens are covered). Medical costs contribute to about half of all bankruptcies in the United States. Emergency rooms in the United States are mandated to accept anyone, regardless of ability to pay, but the mandate comes with no funding to make up the difference. The costs of medical services are inflated; we pay more despite having fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than any other developed nation. Significant money is swallowed up by the profits of the pharmaceutical industry (profit margins around 25%, while 3% is more typical for a large corporation), private insurance administrative costs (about 7% of health care spending), and doctor salary (by far the highest of any developed nation).

Though not a huge fraction of the total cost, the average income of a doctor in the United States is something like $150k. The developed nation average is closer to $100k, with Sweden closer to $75k. However, this is significantly mitigated by the fact that college and medical school are free there, so doctors do not emerge from school saddled with debt.

For comparison, there are about 600k doctors and 60k medical students in the United States. The average cost of medical school is well under $100k per year, even accounting for books and living expenses. That means that cutting average doctor salary from $150k to $130k (which is still higher than any other developed nation) would be sufficient to make medical school completely free, with enough left over to erase all existing medical school debt within a few years.

Of course administration of a large system is a complicated issue. For one thing the United States has a much larger population than any country in which universal healthcare has been implemented. Japan is the closest at less than half our population and there are thirty Americans for every Swede. However, it's not obvious from available statistics that quality of healthcare degrades with population; Japan's healthcare system uses 8.5% GDP to pay for 70% of all medical care. It's hard to imagine that we need to be spending twice the developed nation average for care that consistently ranks badly.

Nation Comparison Statistics
Wikipedia - USA Healthcare
Wikipedia - Sweden Healthcare
Physician Income
Wikipedia - Education in Sweden
Number of Doctors in the USA
Cost of Medical School
Number of Medical Students in the USA

Measurement Systems

The only use of a measurement system is communication, and communication is obviously easier when the measurement system is shared by all parties. Given that the metric system is already used by nearly all of humanity, and given that it is a much more elegant system than the imperial system, it is only logical that the metric system be adopted by the United States as early as possible.

In terms of measuring temperature perhaps the imperial system is more intuitive; humans typically live in the range of 0 to 100 F. Furthermore, the smallest temperature change detectable by humans is thought to be about 1F. The Celsius scale has water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C, which is more convenient in academic contexts, but potentially less convenient in everyday life, which occurs over the range of roughly -20C to 40C.

Now that we've seen the success of the imperial system, let's examine its failings.

As far as measuring sizes the imperial system is woefully awkward. In length the four units - inch, foot, yard, and mile - are all based on obscure historical precedents and are all commonly used. Yet the conversion between inches and yards (how good are you at dividing by 36?), or between miles and anything else, is more or less impossible to do precisely without a calculator. The metric system deals only in factors of ten from the base unit, a meter, which comes from the size of the earth. Similarly for volume, one milliliter is the same as one cubic centimeter (and so on with powers of ten) while imperial units have the fluid ounce, the cup (8 ounces, half of a pint), the pint (the size of one pound of water), the quart (2 pints), and the gallon (4 quarts, 231 cubic inches).

When measuring mass and weight, the imperial system is not only awkward but lazy. The metric system distinguishes mass (the amount of stuff something is made of) from weight (how hard something is pulled down by gravity). In the imperial system both are measured in pounds. Gravity is very close to constant on Earth - varying by less than one percent between Mount Everest and the Dead Sea - but this is still inelegant, particularly in a scientific context. Similarly to length and volume we see that imperial weight is measured in several distinct units: the avoirdupois ounce (about the weight of one fluid ounce of water), the pound (16 ounces), and the ton (2000 pounds). On the other hand the metric system, predictably, uses powers of ten from the base units gram (or ton, which is exactly one million grams) and Newton (on Earth, gravity is about 10 m/s/s so you get ten Newtons for each gram).

Seconds are used by both metric and imperial systems, so of course changing them is not up for debate - though the system could obviously be more elegant.

For all of time humanity has had one constant time scale: the day. It's a length of time that is natural to anyone who has ever lived outside the arctic and antarctic circles. The year is next, as it comes with the passing of seasons. However, the time scales we use in our day to day lives - seconds, minutes, and hours - are all arbitrary. One second is 1/86400 day. That means that we could have easily decided to put ten "hours" to a day, one hundred "minutes" to an "hour," and one hundred "seconds" to a "minute." In that case a "second" and a second would have been nearly the same and a few "minutes" (aka a few millidays) would have been about a few minutes.

We run into more arbitrary units and inelegance when we look at days and months. For example, we have twelve months which can be 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long, and, as such, generally don't divide into an even number of weeks. The year also does not divide into an even number of weeks. And perhaps my favorite: the names September, October, November, and December come from the numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10 (but they're the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months).

It takes just over 365 days for the Earth to go around the Sun. Unfortunately 365 factors into 5*73. Five months of 73 days each and vice versa both seem pretty awkward. If we knock off one day, however, we find that 364 factors to 13*7*2*2. That allows for 13 months of 28 days or 14 months of 26 days. A month of 28 days will allow a whole number of weeks per month (a 26 day month can be divided only into two weeks of 13 day), which seems nice. Furthermore, 28 days is pretty close to the lunar month.

We end up neglecting 1.24 days per year. There's a whole family of proposed reforms to the Gregorian calendar which in large part vary in how they aim to deal with this little amount. It's a mess. Some favor keeping the equinoxes on the same date while others want the same date to always fall on the same day of the week. I like the idea of having a leap month every twenty years, which allows significant drift of equinoxes. (For higher order accuracy a leap month would need to be skipped once every few centuries, just like leap days are now). This is by no means a provably best system, but I think it is clear that we can do better than the current system.

Marriage

As religious definitions are laid out in ancient texts, I'm specifically discussing the government institution here. It's not the place of the state to tell a religious organization which ceremonies they are to perform, but the other side of that coin is that the legal definition of marriage ought to be based on facts and reason (as should any other legal policy).

The first amendment prevents the government from establishing marriage based on biblical prescriptions. And rules based on our sexual or reproductive habits would be an affront to personal privacy. As a result, from the standpoint of the government, marriage is little more than a statement of financial partnership; taxes can be filed jointly, money can be easily inherited, and insurance can be joined. Marriage also allows sharing of privileged information such as medical documents even when an individual is incapacitated.

When viewed this way it's obvious that gay marriage is just as valid as straight marriage. But it's not obvious at all that a marriage must be a contract between exactly two people.

It's clear that we can't go back to polygamous times - one man owning several wives - but I would contend that the problem with that is the gender asymmetry rather than the multi-adult household. There are Americans who choose to engage in non-binary long term romantic relationships. It's a small minority, of course, but so is homosexuality. Only a few percent of Americans are gay. And as we are learning in the marriage equality movement, allowing people who love one another to get married does not negatively affect anyone.

The only possible downside of group marriages that I have been able to come up with is that of tax evasion. A super-wealthy individual could in principle acquire dozens of dependents through a massive group marriage, thereby dodging their tax responsibilities. However, this right already exists, more or less, through the formation of a corporation or LLC.

Sex Education

The USA has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancy and abortion in the developed world. Everyone can agree that this is a problem.

The solution is not abstinence-only sex education. Empirically that's hardly better than none at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which has for decades conducted surveys regarding sexual and reproductive health, premarital sex is nearly universal among Americans. Abstinence-only sex education does not correlate with lower rates of premarital sex. It does correlate with lower rates of contraception use, and as a result higher rates of unplanned pregnancy. These correlations hold even when adjusted for socioeconomic factors.

The solution is obvious. Comprehensive sex education must be compulsory. Children should be literate in matters of sexual health by their teens, at which point half of them will be sexually active, educated or not. The government does not have control over the body of a child but it can do its best to ensure that he or she makes educated choices.

Since it is a fact that young people will have sex, even if they've been told it's unsafe, and even if they've signed an abstinence pledge, the effort must be to ensure that contraception is available to them when they do. This is particularly the case for those who live in poverty, as becoming pregnant at a young age creates positive feedback, sabotaging educational and career options, and making it less likely that the individual will rise from poverty.


Source
Source

Written English

Despite being the most widely spoken language on Earth (though Mandarin has far more native speakers), English is very poorly constructed. Sentence structure and verb conjugation aside, we can critique the very phonetic system that written English uses. Between phonetic degeneracies and pronunciations imported from other languages (eg. pizza, ballet, school), it is not at all obvious from the spelling how many words in the English language pronounced. Since the purpose of written language is to record the oral tradition this is an obvious problem.

The problem is historical, of course; English was built over the course of centuries and through the merging of cultures. Significant efforts have historically been made to standardize it and have, to various extents, been successful. But, unlike ever before in history, the majority of all written English right now is screened by computers. Emails and internet content of course never make it to print, but even books and newspapers are arranged digitally. The standard spell-check dictionary means that an imposition of phonetic changes to English would be much less technically difficult - and much less painful - than it has been in the past.

If we assume (semi-reasonably) that the ubiquity of automated typesetting would handle implementation, we can simply outline the changes that would need to be made.

Sometimes in English it's just the case that the wrong letter is used in a word. For example, there's no need to have PH or GH make a sound like an F; we have the letter F! Similarly, G is used as in GORGE or GROAN, leaving J perfectly suited for words like JILL and GEORGE. The letters S and Z see this problem as well, though perhaps due to their similar sounds and our lazy pronunciation. Z is pronounced as in OOZE, ZEST, and TOPAZ. S is as in SLEEP, SONG, and OATS. Though CHARLES is spelled with an S, it's obviously pronounced with a Z.

Silent letters are almost a non-issue. Since they aren't pronounced, nobody should even notice if they're removed; note that THROUGH is already often abbreviated THRU. This could also be done for some vowels, usually E. Removing the E from the end of a word like DONE necessitates a root change (to DUN) but in some cases the letter is just outright skipped; note that CHARLES is universally pronounced CHARLZ.

The next two issues go hand in hand. Some consonants are redundant, and some sounds don't have letters.

The letters K and S are unambiguous (ignoring for a moment the existence of digrams like SH). And between the two of them they obsolete the letter C (which is sometimes a K and sometimes an S) and the letter X (which is always pronounced KS). We also see that Q is redundant with K, perhaps having QU replaced by KW or KOO.

(English has several consonants - Y and W - which defy their definition. In the middle of a word, Y produces a sound that could just as easily be attributed to I; see for examples OYSTER and ACRYLIC. At the end of a word it's perhaps EE or IE, depending on the word, but certainly some vowel sound or diphthong. W, on the other hand, is always a short OO. Whether that's deserving of its own is a topic for discussion by someone better versed in vowel architectures than I am.)

Looking at the consonants we can see that we've freed up, at least, C, X, and Y. And we have without letters the digrams CH, SH, and TH. The obvious solution is to use the character Y to mean TH, the character X to mean CH, and the character C to mean SH.

So rather than CHARLES, we would write my name XARLZ. It has one vowel, appropriate for a word with one syllable, and each letter represents a unique consonant sound.

When we move on from consonants to vowels, the whole issue becomes much more complicated. Phonetically English has at least a dozen vowel sounds, and of course we have only five characters for them. In Spanish this is solved by the extensive use of diphthongs while in Hungarian the use of dots, accents, umlauts, and double accents is used to cheat them up to fourteen vowel characters. As a result neither language has the vowel ambiguity we see in English. It's not obvious which, if either, of these two is best but they do offer a proof of concept that vowels can be done in a consistent way.

Beyond that we reach the topic of capital letters. They serve no real purpose. Capital letters are used to begin sentences, titles, and proper nouns. However, sentences and titles are denoted using punctuation and style as well. And a proper noun is clear from context in all but the most obscure situations. When reading, the meaning of a word is clear whether not it's capitalized.

On the other hand the concept of capitalization adds a whole dimension of arbitrary rules to writing. Is "Pokemon" supposed to be capitalized? How about "god"? In what cases do you capitalize the second part of a hyphenated word in a title? Should "French fries" and "Brussels sprouts" be capitalized? Each of these questions has a correct answer (though it may depend on context or who you ask) yet none of them add any any information to the text.