RockIslandLine

Yes, it's not at all clear what remedy would be effective.

Some limit on total percentage of searches, similar to the limit in the 1996 Telecommunications Act that no company can own stations reaching more than 35% of the national audience?

That would seem to break google into roughly a triumvirate, but does that actually solve any of the problems in any useful way?

"All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by operating in a capital constrained environment."

That won't necessarily change in a big corporate environment. Management can be surprisingly resistant to approving funding requests.

We had significant problems getting the purchase of android and iOS devices approved for product testing, for instance. I'm certain that the human time spent getting the purchase approved cost far more than the actual purchase.

Gentoo needs vastly better documentation to be useful.

"And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it?"

The APF is funded by severance taxes on oil & mining. I suspect that most people are entirely fine with that tax model.

The problem is that it only supports a small benefit.

"The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?"

Congressional appropriations create money. That's how fiat currency works. We're not on the Gold Standard, we don't need to trace who holds how many Pretty Yellow Rocks.

The real question is "What is the inflationary impact of that spending?", and thus what level taxes have to be raised to destroy enough money to negate the inflation.

The Canadian Manitoba Mincome experiment is probably as close as has been done for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

"But our food supply is highly distributed."

Not nearly as much as it needs to be. Indiana imports 90% of its calories. What does it take to get vegetables grown near Indianapolis?

"whereas you can see instantly if the money you're trying to pay with or receiving in change is the wrong colour."

Now try that when you're blind.

Wizardry and Bard's Tale.

I spent a few thousand hours on each.

It's not just CS. The computational chemistry and materials science crystallography folks can have jobs that run for days or weeks too.

Yeah, discoverability in modern computer UIs is terrible.

The question is why won't they touch it. Unrealistic expectations of high returns kill deals too.

I'd be more than happy to start funding deals with high probabilities of low-to-medium returns. And I know for a fact that those deals exist at the small scale.

Pool of Radiance would wipe your hard drive on uninstall.

I and most of my siblings try to get it every year.

It's recommended for anyone with frequent contact with children.

"In other words, the expected value of the researcher is in excess of the researcher’s cost."

So what magical property of being hired by a government destroys that expected value?

Yeah, discord is pretty bad, but it's better than Zoom.

We always played with a house rule that trades are not allowed until all properties have been purchased.

"The government can’t invent jobs that bring in more revenue than they cost though."

Why not? Is there some reason why a private medical researcher is somehow better than a government medical researcher?

Currency issuers are not revenue constrained. For a nation with a fiat currency, the ability to spend is distinct from the need to tax.

"More stability for her family and a capped mortgage payment every month, yes, but no real chance to actually accumulate wealth."

There's value in getting off the mortgage/rent treadmill entirely. It's a lot cheaper to live in a paid off house.

The quote most people would reference is probably this one:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

– The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.

Great, So when do we start?

I would love to see ads that are only relevant to my life instead of penis pills.

There is literally no excuse for this in 2020.

Funding for rural telecom has been part of every budget for decades. Write a proposal and get it funded.

https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/all-programs/telec...

"Social security could have it's date of insolvency extended. It's currently predicted to be insolvent by 2037."

The US Federal government has both a literal and a figurative money printing press. Congressional appropriations create money. Revenue is an obsolete concept for currency issuers. As a Federal program, it is literally impossible for the program to be "insolvent". Social Security benefits can be paid at full rates for as long as Congress decides to do so.

Why would you ever build that kind of application using web technologies?

Corporations are a power of attorney document. They are golems that sometimes act on behalf of people. They are not people.

"Now, doesn't that make it legal for a group of people to keep secrets about you?"

A group of people sure, but corporations are not people.

"So the government can safely borrow money, but at some point it will accumulate so much debt that people begin to doubt its ability to pay it back."

Currency issuers can always pay any debt denominated in the currency that they issue. It is literally impossible for a currency issuer to be forced to default.

"But decreasing revenue via tax cuts, and increasing debt accumulation, at a time when the economy appears to be booming doesn't appear to be responsible."

That's a sane position, but the argument against a Federal Balanced Budget Amendment comes from the opposite case. You want the capability to deficit spend during recessions. The Federal Balanced Budget Amendment forces you to make the wrong decision of cutting spending during recessions, driving the nation deeper into recession.

When factories are idle and unemployment is high, it is vicious to claim that the best policy is to choose to throw more people out of work. Federal spending should be explicitly countercyclical.

We're not on the Gold Standard. We don't have to track Pretty Yellow Rocks.

The rules are different for Currency Issuers (nations with a fiat currency) versus currency users (citizens, provinces, and nations on the Gold Standard).

For the United States, which is a currency issuer, Congressional appropriations create money. Taxes do indeed return money to the government from the private sector, but there is no need to claim that money is "recycled" for spending purposes.

Revenue is an obsolete concept for currency issuers.

"But the things people with money try to buy, education, property, financial assets, are mostly of a fixed supply and the prices will just keep spiraling."

Education is not in any way a fixed supply. We can train more teachers.