It’s also pretty evident that we could not sustain the current population on preindustrial farming let alone hunter gathering.

Don’t people switch to using subscribed pretty soon anyway? All is full of junk for me.

Where do they do it otherwise? In Australia it’s also yearly.

People might also get bonus so in some sense you get paid once a year.

It actually completely allows it as it is AGPL. The only condition is that you need to release the source code to any users of the service.

In practice it’s hard to keep advertising working while allowing third party applications.

Can you suggest good places in your opinion to get news on the Chinese/Russian situations?

No one is going to flip to your position in a simple argument. If you disagree with them youll need to understand why. Start trying to find out about their position rather than evangelizing yours. If you do that they might open up doubts about theirs.

You have a point but how much cash are we talking about? If you have $10k-$20k sitting around in a chequing account that’s only $200-$400 you are losing to inflation. Things like the earned income tax credit would give you back like $500-$8000. They may not seem super related but in general it’s easier to compensate those lower income folks for inflation than trying to change the inflation target.

Your graph only three data points. Lets say hypothetically the traffic was 100m requests/yr and dropped off immediately after the redesigned you’d still expect to see something like

• 2009 - 100m
• 2010 - 60m
• 2011 - 0

This page has some graphs with more data points but the tl;dr is traffic was down by more than 50% within a month.

Admittedly reddit’s growth was much more muted but Digg did really just destroy the site.

Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign. My memory is hazy but according to this a week after the release they replaced the CEO and two months later they layed off 37% of staff.

You can still build one. I still can’t – in any reasonable way – poach whichever oil rig workers you choose to underpay.

Lets breakdown what those costs are though.

1. Some portion is paid to workers to construct the oil rig.
2. Some may be paid to the government as part of a lease agreement generally to compensate the public for your exclusive use of the well.
3. Some is paid to previous suppliers.

3 is really a combination of 1 & 2 so lets exclude that. For 2 we could have a government that takes this money later. Often this is the case for a lot of these deals. A lease you can pay later and royalties are paid when you actually produce product. That really just leaves 3. If you were able to compel these workers to work for you without compensation then this "How does capitalism empower people to own what they produce?"wouldn’t be true so you’d have to offer some compensation but that compensation could be equity in the form of a workers cooperative.

Is it more difficult for you to compete, sure but that’s like saying it’s more difficult for me to be an artist. I think we should be talking about where we are stepping on the scales for one or another.

United States tax dollars, in the form of DARPA grants, paid for the development of the internet. So there is precedent for extremely expensive operations to be successfully carried out under democratic control

You could government fund everything if you want. It’s usually quite beneficial in things you suggest which are early stage how it would be commercial viable is pretty uncertain. But there are trade offs.

• In market economies you may need to raise the money with debt. If you are an oil producing economy and suddenly the oil price drops you may no longer be able to pay those debts. If you instead lease it to a private company which you then collect royalties or taxes from you don’t have to take that risk. You could fund it with taxes however that limits your growth if you are a smaller economy.
• With the right incentives companies will compete if you have just a single nationalised producer where bureaucrats don’t the same level of incentive as owners they likely will run it less efficient. There is obviously the case though that often private companies push for regulations that limit competition and try to reduce their costs for externalities they impose on others.

Also, since oil deposits are a natural resource, one could argue government ought to be involved in their collection.

I think it’s correct to say government should be collecting revenue from the natural resource but I don’t think they need to specifically be the ones running it.

I should clarify I think capitalism is great but doesn’t mean our implementation is perfect (and an example is privately owned land).

I made sure to say more difficult not just difficult. Building an oil rig is inherently difficult because you need many different types of labor with many different skill sets. As a practical matter it’s often easy for one organization to pay for this labor upfront but theoretically they could cooperate to build an oil rig and share in the returns.

If you were going to mention the rights to extract oil then that’s a whole other probldm.

that is used to collect the products of another person’s labor.

This is only really true if they have a monopoly where it’s more difficult or impossible for others to compete. Otherwise if the labourer isn’t getting the full value of their labour they can go somewhere else.