I was happy when I replaced my used '69 VW Beetle and my newer used car had separate turn indicators instead of the single "<=>". :-)

Imagine if the US the operated that way. The rest of the world would be writing in Cyrillic.

If you actually believe any of that I have bridge to sell you.

Collecting finger prints, logging serial numbers, and finally correlating any of that with other data sources means at the very least getting hold of the notes to make some comparisons. You are talking about a high friction high cost effort that generally speaking can only be employed against someone already being watched.

Digital currency on the other hand means we are few SQL joins from tracking any token thru the economy as far as one might wish, and just as easily from source to sink and sink to source. Going electronic changes EVERYTHING..

I overheard two idiots arguing in the park the other day. "You don't know where I live", I am maybe 30 feet away at the next picnic table thinking, "well you seem to know each others names so if you own your place and live in the county, he certainly does after a 5 min of GIS lookup, which he could do right here from a mobile". Sure if the name is real common like Joe Baker there might be 15 hits or so but then which one is convenient to the current local, probably narrows right down to 1.

Anything uniquely identifiable, and searchable electronically isn't anonymous. Privacy around a digital currency, any digital currency is likely to be a polite fiction at best if National banks even bother with that in the end.

Lets go with the UN number. There are 195 nations in the world. We can argue there are more but the odds of getting any good data out of the ones the UN does not even recognize are low.

A good deal of those, all EU members for example are shall we say less than independent in their ability to determine tax rates at least for certain types of taxes.

Check writing has been around in various forms as long as there has been banks, but as far as day to day transactions go, ie not weekly payroll and major purchases there has been any alternative to cash for very long. Diners Club in the 50s, but really it isn't until the 80s anyone could reasonably expect to use a credit card at certain types of establishments. It probably isn't until the middle 90s Joe Public could really anticipate a day out without using any cash if he did not wish to; and that still would limit his options.

All this in the USA. I'd be surprised if the US wasn't near to the vanguard when it came to reduction in the use of cash. Yes I know parts of Asia / India etc do literally every thing on mobiles and have for a while. My point here is this all brings us into the era of current political animals and current social expectations around tax rates and where those tolls are levied.

Considering all the other noise and confounding forces in tax policy, I don't think there is nearly enough data out there to draw any sort of meaningful insight as to cash use vs tax rates required.

But he ded!

FTFY

Nothing will happen because there is zero reason to expect anything should happen.

If you tell me tomorrow the sun isn't going to rise. You're the one making the extraordinary claim. You need to show your work, and explain why it is going to be different and what the agent of that change is.

We have need AI is at the end of the day automation technology. The latter half of 20th century and most of 21st has seen the introduction of new and more automation nearly constantly, and guess what we have hovered near full employment most of the time.

So yeah i am trying to clear it up for you, because you're about as sharp as the typical brick. Either explain why this is different or STFU, because if you don't know why it should be different, there is no reason it should be different.

You're not speaking reasonably you are breathlessly repeating the same nonsense over and over.

At no point in history has the market failed to grown and employee more people after the introduction of new technology. For any of what you prattle on endlessly about to have even a grain of truth we must first accept that something which has NEVER occurred in the last four centuries of market economies is about to happen.

You have no evidence it is about to happen you can point at. This is reason enough to dismiss you entirely.

The next issue is we actually have experience dealing with work shortages. The WPA was created to address just that, if things do go really really sideways we could use the same playbook. We have fiat currency now to so the government can just print money to pay for it all. Effectively redistributing wealth from the people who have it to the wage workers it is paying. The economy would respond be producing the basic staple items those people need to buy at the expense of luxury items and by extension more complex specialized goods. Generally that isn't desirable and would not be good policy, but in Great Depression like emergency it worked before, should work now.

Realistically we have no lack of jobs, stopping illegal immigration, eliminating ag visa programs, and deporting illegals already here (a perfect good makes work project of its very own) will create significant labor shortage anytime as a policy we decide we want one. The best part is all those people you claim have the literacy of a 12 year old will be OVER qualified for most of it! Wages will rise until jobs get filled or hunger will rise until people accept the wages, the market will find equilibrium.

So which is it, are we about to have NO jobs, or are we about to have nobody to do all the jobs? Can't be both! Neither should really keep us up at night. Because either problem itself or the solution failing to resolve it has to have metric ton of "But this time will be different" applied before they even start to interface with reality. You're stupid, that is literally the entire story here.

ok, full Office Outlook certainly had/has a ton warts but lets get real about it being 'good'.

Rewind to 1997. There were some other really capable mail clients out there that really could manage very large 10k+ message mailboxes offline (key word for the time), the space got pretty rarefied as you started looking at elegant support for things like shared mailboxes or 'public folders' and of course mail integrated calendaring..

Of the few options that remained suitable for large corporate mail deployments Exchange 5/Outlook was certainly as good or better than much of what was left.

Of course Notes/Domino was massively supperior in terms of capability and security, but by 2000 Microsoft go so very much better at mail/calendar and UX that all the rest of that capability and reliability still could not cut it. That and Notes cost to damn much..

100% this -anyone allowing the device to start up without a pin/password was box-checking their way thru some FDE compliance mandate not taking device encryption seriously as a security control

Western governments have been ensuring that general public does not have access to encryption since clipper chip and likely before. Once computers got powerful enough and electronic communication got cheap enough they got worried and have been working to sabotage any true E2E ever since.

Which is why taking advice from government agency, let alone allowing them to set enforceable standards should be opposed, and to the degree advice from NIST/CISA/FBI/NSA etc should be followed it needs to be run thru the common sense test and smell tests, and independently evaluated BEFORE implementation. In most cases it is good advice. As long as the threat model isn't - keep your data away from a 5 eyes agency.

Realistically nobody controls the software stack, it does not matter how good your crypto is if you are auto updating and installing code that can send the data home after its already decrypted even if the keys do remain a secret in some secure enclave.

Realistically for most users the best place to keep the real keys to your personal the kingdom and your most private conversations, is probably a second mobile device from a reputable vendor that mostly remains at home and use something like iMessage or Signal. Reboot the device often only install the handful of applications you need, don't use it for browsing. That really should keep your stuff beyond the reach of most threat actors. Will dear old uncle Sam still be able to get into if the situation becomes serious enough they are willing to expose methods and practices, perhaps after some public theater where they pretend to need Apple/Samsung/Alphabet's help and/or that they have to really coerce that cooperation, certainly. However we probably really are into if you have not done anything wrong you have nothing to hide territory there...like if you murder 10s of innocent people in a night club or something f-u I hope society does rifle thru your stuff.

How about forwarding the message back to the sender(s), does the original still get included?

Randal's argument was never legitimate. It supposed those trades people were free agents who could turn down the job without getting force choked.

Yeah, there is a stigma, that if anyone deciding to commit crimes, might possibly give a little thought to the future before deciding that committing a crime is a good idea.

It's kinda like the story of would you want your daughter marrying a man who just got out of jail after killing his first wife? There is a value to having impulse control, and looking beyond what they want to do right now.

There are all manner of narratives - I guess I have one too. There are narratives that if everyone has money, free health care, and society accepted them, there would be no crime. That society forces people to perform criminal acts. It is similar to the idea that society causes insanity.

Well. we learn over time. Before Herbert Needleman, the dangers of lead poisoning were known, but it's effects upon people, who from childhood were exposed, and they ended up being violent criminals - that was fairly new, and compelling enough to knock some sense into people.

Another case I know personally, a friend had adopted a young boy, who was troubled, and the thought was a better environment would eliminate those issues. I liked the kid. Most of the time, he was great. Outgoing, friendly, smart. But he was still getting into trouble. I noticed that it was three months behaving, then a short period of bad. I mentioned it, but everyone thought that was 100 percent coincidence. Eventually they figured out I was right, by that time, he'd committed some serious crimes.

Some sort of chemical imbalance? That was my guess. Point is, yeah, we're going to find out more reasons as time goes on. The question is what makes the people in your example not cooperate?

People should not ever decide that since "the man" got away with something, so it is perfectly alright to do the same things. If that is the case, they deserve the punishment, even if "the man" is not. That. is the most masochistic example to whataboutism on their part.