If those taxation rates are marginal instead of effective, you adjust the rates to meet the current US budget(*), and you ammend item 4(**), then you've got me sold.

(*) The US government budget is around $1T. Average US wage is $40k. US population is 300M, so total US wages are around $12T. Thus the average effective tax should be 8.3% to meet the current budget. Of course the progressive aspect of the tax rate means that the average doesn't mean much, but plugging in a few sample salaries seems to indicate that those rates are already about right. I'd just want see a proper analysis to be sure.

(**) I'd want to be able to split my income among any group of people (roommates, parents, children, friend I'm putting though graduate school, etc.). A spouse would be only one example of that relationship. Provided the money is truely communal, then the tax code needs to reflect the effective income of the individual.

What does "horizontal boring damage" mean? People drilling though the air? Animals that burrow though plastic and copper (but only horizontally)?

Cheap, unarmored and expendable, but small and hard to hit. I think I've heard of that formula before. Oh yeah ... it was how Doug Lenat beat the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron.

(In fairness, his ships couldn't even move and these things can fly.)

For some reason, their hum sounds ominous to me. It's like something from a distopian future.

... until they start carrying live ammo.

Translations differ in the wording of verses. Maybe at that church everyone may use the same translation, but that is not always or even often the case.

VAT is not the same as sales tax. Resold items get retaxed under sales tax but not VAT. So 8% sales tax with one middle man is equivalent to 16.64% VAT which no longer looks so low.

Yes! Please! So many QR codes are in-place-of rather than in-addition-to a human-readable URL. If I don't have my phone with me or don't want to bother digging it out of my pocket (or don't even have a QR-enabled phone), then the QR code is just obfuscation.

Smart people will always include a human-readable URL next to the QR code, but given that most QR designers evidently aren't smart enough for that, I'll settle for a human-readable QR.

I think you've hit upon how to defeat it. Time to start getting suspicious of anyone carrying two cameras.

I wonder if you could borrow ideas from operating systems like micro-kernels (e.g. L4) or software isolated processes (e.g. Sigularity)? It's not a project that I have the time or experience for, but I'd be interested to see the results if someone else tried.