Get them a nicer version of things they already get. Fancy coffee, hot sauces, soap, candles, pens, that sort of thing. It loses some of its charm, but that could also mean a gift card to a nicer restaurant. Just make sure it’s enough to cover the meal.
This works especially well if they’re pretty cheap and wouldn’t get things like that, simply because they’re too expensive.
You can also go for some very pseudo-luxury items. Vermont Maple syrup (or Maple candies - seriously, it’s just crystalized sugar, but it seems so rich), sausage and cheese sets, chocolate oranges…
Finally, here’s the biggest tip - Don’t wait until December to think about it. Pay attention through the year. They will almost certainly mention something offhand to you. A passing comment like “we never have enough -----” or “---- never works right” are perfect opportunities. Just make a note on your phone. Feel free to ask probing questions and even tell them that’s what you’re doing- if it’s before Halloween, they’ll almost certainly forget by Xmas anyway.
I enjoy just some simple residential gardening and have started a bonsai hobby about 2 years ago. I posted several things here on Lemmy but the bonsai community is basically non-existent here.
I’ve always thought it would be an interesting experiment for all (or most) proposed laws to be written as though they were scientific experiments, complete with:
Hypothesis (what is the law intended to accomplish?),
Metrics (how will effectiveness be measured),
Effectiveness period (when will these effects be realized?)
Success cnriteria (what is the minimum effect to consider the law effective?)
Side effects (what might go wrong, and how will that be evaluated?)
There’s probably lots that does not cover, but the main idea is that any new law comes with quantitative ways to determine its effectiveness against its stated goals. Any law that does not meet those goals in the predefined time period is scrapped.
But again, as Zeppo said, without an informed and interested electorate, it’s all pretty much moot.
I would love for laws to be written in a git repository, with each addition /subtraction traceable to a specific lawmaker with a full commit and blame history available to the public starting from the very beginning.
very interesting, that could even help fight corruption. but what politician would ever make that a law? if you have the power to decide if you get to be lazy and tell lies, you will decide to be lazy and tell lies.
I suggest googling reproducibility/replication crisis or Francesca Gino or have a look at RetractionWatch. I wish your portrait of scientists were true but alas.
If it were such a wide spread issue, then science would not achieve the results it does. It lives from people checking other people’s work and arguing about the results.
There is still an issue of human bias, though. A thought is not accepted unless it's widely accepted. Even much of our established science was once a pipe dream, even with reproducible proof, until it was accepted on a wider scale.
It's not as simple as just providing proof and letting people accept it, you have to appeal to them. Which is exactly what politicians do.
It’s pretty incredible what we know about history, just from guessing by what we find and second guessing the first guess with more findings.
Or how we know pretty much all steps how the language evolved from Latin, thousands of years ago, to Italian, which is spoken today.
What I despise is when things are quite clear and politics just act like we would not know. Like how „brain drain“ is still a valid talking point while science already knows it’s false.
I agree. I only wanted to point out that reaching a consensus about the results of an experiment or a study is more difficult in some areas of research.
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