ajkjk
The social and technological infrastructure for a digital 'state' doesn't exist at the moment but there's no reason it couldn't.
Well, one could argue there is a state at present, just, that it is not a very good one. In which case the necessity is the digital equivalent of a 'revolution' against it.
For some specific examples, it is not hard to imagine a parallel-universe internet which punishes fraudulent behavior by banning actors from all of its territory. Or which imposes transaction costs on things that are presently free (email, etc) to prevent spam. Or which coordinates micropayments in lieu of advertising/manipulation funding. Or which guarantees that the equivalent of domains never change hands, to prevent the problem of domains being taken after they expire and used for nefarious purposes..
Of course this raises all sorts of other concerns (cf how incensed people become by the idea of using real identities, age verification, or any other threats of censorship). But that is the same problem as the question of what makes physical states 'legitimate': how do you build an institution which has enough legitimacy that people buy into it instead of rejecting it? By guaranteeing rights, having good leadership, having good constitutional processes, whatever else... it is 'the' hard problem of civilization, and probably there is no perfect solution, but that doesn't mean you get to get away with not solving it by ignoring it; refusing to face it directly means just defaulting to a particular outcome without getting to even debate the tradeoffs of the choice you have made.
Maybe not legally, but morally... yeah? It's definitely gross, in the sense that I would like to see it eradicated as a system.
"Cheating" systems benefits people in the short term but corrupts the, like, fabric of society in the long term ... when cheating is normalized and you have to cheat to get ahead then everything kinda vaguely sucks all the time. People often end up in a posture vis-á-vis big corporations where it feels like cheating them is morally okay because the corporations are cheating in a systemic way, or otherwise don't deserve moral recognition because they're too diffuse and machine-like... I empathize with that. But we shouldn't turn around and therefore _not_ interpret the cheating as cheating. It's still bad. But if you do it "at scale" and make a business model out of it and then get caught... well you're an idiot. I agree that it feels weird that this was a prison sentence instead of a big fine. I imagine it's a question of magnitude: it was more than skimming off a profit, it was basically at the scale of 'criminal enterprise' and we ... don't like those.
> I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.
It's obviously a question of what you have the agents doing.
> And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.
I agree.
you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been
most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.
it's possible that with the fees removed cards still have rewards because the premium cards still want your business (they have other mechanisms for making money than just interest + fees, cf https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-credit-cards-make...)
however I maintain that credit card rewards are a net drain on society. Paying for things should just be paying for them, not a complicated system that generates fake money points that you can then turn around and spend in bizarre ways if you remember to. The whole system is stupid.
and don't pretend like it's not possible, it's obviously possible: take the system and lower the fee to something proportional to the price of providing the service
if credit card rewards programs have to go to make it economically viable -- awesome, that would be a second win.
There's also one that says that forced Navier-Stokes can implement universal computation (so, is Turing complete). I don't think any of these are resolving open problems per se, but they're interesting for other reasons.
or rather: you have personal experiences like whatever your experiences are like, not like theirs, and then you write about them if you think anyone else would also be interested.
Although perhaps I'm misunderstanding and the idea is that each wallet device requires a separate implementation and this is just Apple's version? I guess that makes sense. But if the product is "easily make passes for your business" and then they are Apple-locked, that is obnoxious and anti-consumer and people should refuse to use it.