"The ultimate goal is to connect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide," Wyler said in an interview after his pep talk. "We're bringing connectivity and enabling it for people around the world, and in rural populations."

Sometimes, the problem isn't just lack availability of the internet, it's also the cost.

He'll need to make sure that his internet is cheap enough that people in those rural populations can afford to use it.

That's the problem - they thought they had enough abundance and production.

But did they really? If they did, and things are even cheaper now, why do we still need to work so hard?

The debate isn't about whether UBI would be a good idea or not. I think it would be, in that it would give people the freedom to do what they want to do, rather than they have to do. I also think that it would give families more time to spend together, leading to stronger relationships, better mental outcomes, and so on.

The debate really is about how to fund such a scheme... I doubt that the funds are available for this, and even they were, I believe that the political resistance to re-appropriating money from other sources would be so intense in many countries that the scheme would be a non-starter.

I think that the problem will really only be solved when technology enables things that people need (food, water, electricity, clothing, shelter) to be made so cheaply that the cost of funding such a program will be relatively trivial.

Till then, it's just a good subject for frequent Slashdot debates...

It's not 14! you want to compare the lower bound with, it's 14! * 14.

Exactly what I wondered about when I saw this story. It's not just Nigeria, there are huge swathes of the world where electricity is a luxury. Why on earth is this news?

Many of those locations might be closed.

For example, for the one in Redmond OR, there's this:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/block...

"But the store doesn't have to accept them either, and many stores don't even if they're the "Visa" gift cards that aren't tied to one chain."

That's why the government will need to back this for it to work - the government will need to tell all stores to treat this card just like they treat money.

There is an advantage to the government, in that it saves on the cost of printing and managing paper bills, but this is not a big enough problem that the government would be able to justify the huge change. The only motivation for the government to do this would be if it could remove the anonymity aspect (it could then say that this was being done to keep citizens safe, prevent fraud, etc.)

Of course, there will always be the worry about the damage to this system if it was hacked in an act of terrorism.

Are the obstacles towards going cashless technological or political?

Just supposing the technology did exist to have cards that held a representation of value. Let's say that these cards were backed by the government (i.e. so that you could transfer money to an individual or organisation without anyone having to pay charges on the transfer). Lastly let's also say that such technology was anonymous (i.e. so that if I stole your card with whatever 'money' was on it, I could use it without anyone asking me whether I was authorised to do so).

Would this take off? Would it be blocked by lobbying from Visa and other payment system companies, or protests from anti-government types who would not believe that such technology would *truly* be anonymous?

UFOs are just that - Unidentified Flying Objects.

The hoopla around them is just because for *some* people, their existence is more exciting than the boring reality of human existence.

Personally, the more boring something tends to be (like water, air, gravity), the more grounded in reality I find it to be.

A good question to ask is - what is it reasonable to expect to be private?

Here are some scenarios that most people would agree would qualify as an invasion of privacy:
- If what you did on your personal property behind closed doors was made public;
- If you gave personal information to someone, and they said that they would keep it secret, but they then disclosed it to someone else.

Here are some scenarios that would *not* qualify as invasion of privacy:
- If you did something on property that was not yours, and it was made public;

I am not sure of a situation where you give personal information to someone, and they make it public after making no guarantees to you that they would keep such information secret. Are you foolish for giving the information without such guarantees, or should you expect that because the information is personal, you should automatically assume it should be kept secret? Why should you have such an expectation?

That'll be easy enough for telling an apple from a banana, but hard when telling a Gala apple from a Braeburn apple.

I would have thought that people using EBT cards have more pressing problems than dealing with the high cost of Amazon Prime subscriptions...

I guess that the flip side of this is that there's also no good way to kill a good idea, too.

Next, we'll be reading stories that Kim Kardashian has given birth to twins on this site.

It's getting to the point where in the future, nobody will be able to tell what's true and what's false.

That's really problematic, because if two people who need to dialogue with each other don't have a 'frame of reference', how *can* they discuss anything?