As proponent of Basic Income, I disagree with much of the analysis offered in the linked article. However, I wanted to sink into this one point in particular: "If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them." This is a seductive line of reasoning, and appealing to liberals. But it misses the point about HOW taxation must be structured to take this into account. While basic income must NOT be means tested, taxation almost certainly must be. Poor ppl shouldn't be burdened by having to prove or disprove wealth and income. Having grown up poor I can assure you that that IS a huge burden. Let those most benefiting from the system be the ones who fight for the most fair tax rate possible, because they have all the tools and expertise at their disposal to do that. Poor ppl do not. So to the extent that basic income hurts ppl on the bottom, the taxcode must to that extent raise revenue from the higher economic classes to compensate for it. Easier said than done, of course, but the practicality of moving forward is an entirely different issue than the theoretical underpinnings of the idea in the first place. http://www.cbpp.org/poverty-an...

We techies need to help guide people toward safer sources of software that won't infect their machines. Open source software from reputable sources is generally much safer than pirated software from the darker corners of the internet. If you pirate software, you need to take inconvenient precautions like setting up a virtual machine that you can assume is totally insecure. Yet another reason to choose open source.

Here in Hawai'i, we have "charter" schools which are experimental schools less restricted by the rules and policies of the Dept. of Education. Of these charter schools, we have ThompsonAcademic.org, an "E-Charter" school which teaches its courses almost entirely online. Teachers actually gets more face time one-on-one with the students who need it, because only struggling students are required to come in for direct personal tutoring. This school attracts a mix of students from both ends of the academic spectrum-- from the overacheiving homeschoolers to the borderline drop-outs who are fed up with traditional schools. Thompson Academic does require its students to enroll full time. If students only want supplemental online courses, there is E-School (http://www.eschool.k12.hi.us/). Hawai'i needs online education in part because it is hard to provide a full spectrum of courses to every island. And many students are surfers (some pro) who would skip school anyway when the surf is up. Online education is not for everybody, but I wish I had this option growing up.