If you were guaranteed a basic income, you wouldn't need to devote so much wisdom to money matters, and could use it instead to advance knowledge and create technology that would further raise standard of living and keep the currency strong because we produce things others want. (Consider Japan with a 200% debt-to-gdp ratio and a currency whose value they consider too high.)

The value is psychological. If we believe only scarce things have value, then the knowledge in wikipedia is worthless? Sunlight, air is valueless? The more freedom we have, the less it's worth?

Note that physics doesn't operate on this principle. The more mass you have, the more gravity. Mass isn't "worth less" if there's more of it in physics equations.

Psychology is changeable. One way of changing the idea that artificial scarcity creates value is to look at a graph of the money supply in the US. Notice how the great majority of the increase is due to private banks. So why isn't the currency devalued, psychologically, when such exponential increases take place?

Bankers claim some sort of divine, exclusive right to create money, and automatically attach debt to it, because otherwise how would they get attention? But we'll still give them attention, poor dears, while voting for the govt to empower individuals instead of institutions with a basic income, and encouraging innovation (which is what physically raises standard of living) through challenges.

Isn't there a high demand for dollars? So isn't creating more just decreasing the artificial scarcity?

Isn't the "inflation tax" lower than any flat tax that's ever been proposed?

Eternal vigilance. When we do something wrong, call us on it. When we do something right, like the virtual embassy thing, give credit.

Better: beam in free, uncensored internet so the Iranian ppl can bypass govt censorship. Then do the same thing in the US!

It is the place of the US to stand up for unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And biz is better? The number of middle managers has been expanding while productivity means that the number of actual ppl doing the work decreases. But biz has to support all that dead weight of managers who do not contribute any value except in terms of ppl skills, pretending to be busy when the boss is around, schmoozing, etc.

Look up the definition of sociopathy; it fits corporations' charters. Corporations don't care about people or emotions, they just want to use people to increase profits.

We the ppl control the government. We get to elect our representatives, or use direct methods such as referendums. I trust government much more than I trust the sociopathic corporation CEO who doesn't swear to uphold the Constitution, doesn't care about the General Welfare, wants to restrict the freedom of speech of anyone speaking against him or his company, and lies to cover up mistakes by his company (salmonella outbreaks, loss of data to hacking, etc.).

'Information isn't free. We know that. It "costs" something.'

What if you record information with dark energy, which seems to be free?

Or what if as Wiener said information is carried by matter and energy, but is ultimately separate from it?

For example, Fermat's Last Theorem was true before it was proved, but that information wasn't contained in matter or energy before Wiles proved it in the 1990s...

In the same way, there are laws of physics we haven't discovered yet, so they aren't expressed in terms of matter and energy in bits. But the information is somewhere.

"The absolute smallest space you could use to record the information about the position and rotation and composition of an atom would be at least the size of an atom"

Isn't that like saying the smallest space you can record this comment is at least as big as this comment...

What about free online classes like Stanford, Khan Academy etc. are providing? What about IRC, where ppl help each other for free? Give up your old feudal paradigms, embrace the new information age where the cost of disseminating knowledge is basically zero.

Productivity should measure happiness and quality of life, not number of dollars produced. Money is a tool to serve us, not the other way around.

It's bad because Liberty is an unalienable right, and the government has no business deciding what you should study.

We are tool-builders, and we created money as a tool to help us. Instead we find economists treating money as a God to which we must sacrifice humans (not them, but other, poorer, humans).

Unemployment is a good thing, a sign of economic progress, the result of higher productivity. What we should do is provide a basic income to everyone who wants one, and hold challenges to stimulate innovation and the advance of knowledge. Because it is knowledge that confers the greatest survival benefit by enabling us to better predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.

But they've measured the speed of photons accurately with it...(as a post below says)

Doesn't OPERA's equipment work for other experiments? So the voltmeter has been tested on other batteries...