wards

Think iterated prisoner's dilemma crossed with PageRank, which effectively wards against many types of collusion including simple sybil attacks.

That said, places like the Heights and the wards have some interesting character as a result.

Maybe our parents should all have been removed, and each of us would have been better cared for as wards of the state.

It reads to me like a complaint about wards of the state but I may have misunderstood.

It's about an entire society that has self-assembled into a caste system by treating some portions of the society as wards of the state.

The wards of the state aren't expected to be independent and responsible.

Moving my body or locations temporarily wards it off like a snooze button, but the struggle also keeps me from losing myself in a novel.

Those jobs disappeared, those workers retired or had to find another job (or were disabled by the hard labor and became wards of the state in another way).

I think the best you could do just be examining the lock without opening it would be to figure out the wards (equivalent to figuring out what key blank the key is cut from).

Does it help people to quit, or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state, with little genuine incentive to alter their behavior?

I used meditech as a medical student on the wards.

If the latter scenario is the case and addicts are becoming wards of the state, then costs cannot be expected to decrease over time, and addiction rates will not drop.

That's when the state steps in to take care of its wards "for their own good", and it's inevitable that over-corrections will happen.

The "wars" and the militarism is essentially just a tool to extract ever more money from the government, the economy, and tax payers in order to funnel them to wards the power brokers.

"...or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state..." My point is that this question is nearly pointless to ask.

It's the same reason that we have predictable "unpredictable" "bubbles" in the economy and it is why we start wards who's sole purpose is justification to steal public money for private gains.