If this is good advice, the government is tyrannical.

Better to just not own/use a smartphone.. or a cellphone at all. It's still possible to do and retain a social life.

Spare me the "well everyone expects you to have one now" responses. We're all too caught up in choosing convenience over protecting ourselves from tyranny.

It would cost no more than current systems

This is factually incorrect. Even assuming single payer medical care is done separately and paid for all the welfare in the US a generous (Obama's)probable discretionary budget generously proportioned (assume 100% of labor, agriculture, housing, veterans benefits, and internal affairs budget go to welfare) gives 320 billion to welfare. Divided by the population of the US that's a little over $1000 per person. Now add mandatory spending (the above link includes this information) and assume 100% of food and social security spending counts as welfare, again divide by the population of the US. That's about $4400 per person. Total: $5400 per person and that assumes not a cent is needed for program administration. Your proposed amount of basic income comes to $450 per person, per month. If you want that to rise to a number people can live on you're going to have to significantly raise taxes or print 33 to 50 percent more money.

Given the percentage of people who cannot be profitably employed today and given the rate at which technology is increasing that percentage I believe basic income is an absolute necessity. But we need to be realistic at how much it costs and create a realistic plan for implementing it.

Assuming you ran that program, would you feel safe running it on your actual computer on your actual network?

I wouldn't. Its basically a free for all VPN that you throw on your machine. Anyone could use that thing. yeah, people in repressive regimes trying to be free. Also terrorists and pedophiles.

And lets not forget hackers that want to exploit your good will to gain access to your system.

Now lets assume you really want to help so you're going to run this thing. What sort of precautions would you have to take to do it responsibly?

I'm thinking I would have to run it sandboxed or VMed somehow. Or on a spare machine that I don't care about. Possibly on a raspberry pi because why not.

Then I'm thinking it would have to be on a different VLAN. Because I am sure as hell not sharing a private network with that thing.

And even then I'm thinking that isn't enough because what is to stop the hacker that takes control of the raspberry pi on VLAN2 from simply hacking the router, gaining access to VLAN1, and then proceeding to rape my network from the inside out?

You see the problem. I like the idea of this thing. I just can't trust it. Maybe if I put it on a hosted system data center or something and let them deal with it. After all they have no reason to trust anyone that hosts programs on their systems. They should firewall everything from everything else as a matter of course.

Does it make any sense to bridge the first router that creates VLAN2 to a second router so that if someone accesses the gateway they won't actually be accessing the router that controls the VLANs? That is, bridge a second router on VLAN2 to the port and let it act as the gateway for the suspect system?

Would that make this operation safe or is this just needless abstraction that doesn't accomplish anything?

So, since we're being charged by the bit now, and the government is taking my bits (that we pay for) off the pipe and replacing them with their bits (that we also pay for)... wouldn't that imply that these "state actors" should be on the hook for at least part of our ISP usage bills?

At that point, I just hope they understand the difference between right and wrong (and that you shouldn't do "wrong" things) more than anything.

And yet, when I took my 6 year old nephew hunting last year, I had to explain how death works when he asked, "But won't the deer just respawn?"

So, anecdote for anecdote, we just broke even.

FWIW, I'm guessing the difference is, you're at least a decent parent, whereas my in-laws are abject fucking morons whose idea of discipline equates to 'how loud can I scream at my kid.'

Of course, the apparently high number of 'abject fucking moron' parents seems to give some weight to my hypothesis.

Yea, like that, but with better geometry.

Because they're robots, you see...

I know a guy in a similar circumstance - used to write software for banks, now he does ultra-high-end home automation installs in penthouse suites around the nation. If I could handle that much travel, I'd be in on it myself.

It's funny, but to me, most adults seem to have a real problem remembering how they saw things as children, and I think that's the primary reason why they tend towards overprotectiveness. I don't claim to have perfect memory, but I never had any issues determining what's reality and what's fantasy. To me, books, games, movies etc were just that: books, games, and movies. They were entertaining diversions. I knew they could represent ideas/concepts that aren't real. Reality was what's happening in front of me and what I could figure out for myself, but I was one of those kids who never bought into santa claus either.

Games like call of duty are targeted at 14 year olds, and by that age, I'd already had 10 years of practice at the above. By 10/11, these kids should already have a sound foundation of reality. If not, then that's serious parental neglect. If their parents did their jobs right, there's no reason to take them to israel to teach them the lesson. There's a lot of 'omg violence' over there, and I think he's just being over-the-top preachy and/or acting out of overprotective concern.

External factors do influence of course, but I think it's overly simplistic to assume tweenage kids think cod = real war, where soldiers respawn after they're shot.

Some people think that, because they believe themselves to have a solid grip on reality, every single one of the other 6,999,999,999 humans on the planet also have an equally solid grip.

Of course, that belief in itself is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, but you can't tell those folks that, because, being delusional, they'll never believe you.

You also had people who believed if they worshiped a particular sky-fairy, it would grant them wishes. Like, believed to the point that they would outright slaughter people who disagreed with them. Does that not sound like a person who can't separate reality from fantasy?

FYI, we still have those people today, slaughter and all.

If you're not already signed up for the Olympics, get your name in there - you'd definitely medal in Mental Gymnastics.

Silver at least.