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A universal stipend, without means testing or any other qualifier, would be such a literal, blunt form of redistribution that it might become less vulnerable to the traditional pitfalls of corruption and power mongering. At least that is the thinking I have heard expressed in the valley.

I am sk…

We're still analyzing Eric's model and the results it is generating, but a few things can already be said. One is that adding a cost to information does not blow up this type of model. Insurance companies do not go out of business. In fact, there appear to be states in "paid-for" information models…

[...] Are you still keeping people in the center? Is it still all about the people? Are you really avoiding the lazy trapdoor of falling back into thinking of people as components and a central server as being the only point of view for defining efficiency or testing efficacy?

Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we've been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.

Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what acco…