I can't quite understand this "privacy problem". What's wrong with just accepting Google's TOS, use it for what it's worth (doing "public" stuff), and making room for "private" operations elsewhere? Aren't higher levels of "privacy" just a browser profile/user profile/machine profile away any more?
Are there reasons why the idea of a Guaranteed Minimum Income could not be implemented using a peer-to-peer system? Would middlemen be strictly necessary?
I don't really know (yet?), but it seems to me that what you need is a network of nodes, such that each node automatically downloads a common amount of money from a pool once a month. That pool would be filled by the system subtracting a percentage from the gross income of each node. Is it really necessary that those calculations are done by a central unit - like the IRS -, or could they be done in a distributed manner, SETI@home-style?
It seems to me that the real solution is to dramatically limit the size of government, so that there is nothing to be bought, rather then just changing the currency used to make the purchase.
Either you have an elected government which makes the law, or the decision about how to behave is made by individual interests and resources, which are much easier to buy or otherwise influence than elected representatives.
> the decision about how to behave is made by individual interests and resources, which are much easier to buy or otherwise influence than elected representatives.
You're ignoring the diversity of individual choice plus the information problem.
I've yet to hear of a politican, technocrat, or bureaucrat who can do a better job deciding for me. To be fair, they don't have the information.
Feel free to delegate decisions wrt your resources as you see fit, but leave me out of it.
There surely are a lot of people who obtain quality content through TPB without paying for it. However, from what I could observe, attempts at making this group of people pay anyway have been largely fruitless so far, while at the same time they often appear to inconvenience paying customers, e.g. through intrusive "copy protection" schemes. So as a content producer, I tend to think of what I might "loose" through TPB as "promotion expenses".
There is a class of bosses who would accept that (obviously if you also stay twenty minutes longer & are salaried, they have nothing to lose). There is also a class of bosses who would not care how much sense it did or didn't make.
In an open office if it wasn't part of the company culture, few bosses will accept it. The political ramifications of having your employees sleeping when the VP walks by are too great (and, often, the manager won't even have the option to explain why it's good). I fully understand the benefits of napping, but I would demand employees to "get a room", for their sake and mine.
Hunter's rule: Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that number.
I'm sorry, but as a "ground rule", this seems just wrong to me.
There are many ways and many reasons to use e.g. Facebook as a communication service that have nothing to do with "being popular". Let me describe just one: I have a pseudonymous Facebook profile which gathers a number of people I have worked and played with before; some of them I know for more than 30 years already. Additions to this group happen, but are rare; these people are special to me, a status which is not for everybody. Each one in there is an important voice in my life, representing their values as they post their daily findings to my feed. Since I'm also all locked down against games and other apps, I have no problems with my signal-to-noise ratio being low.
