With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.

The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.

In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.

We can still do that, it's called paying with cash. Paper money is the people's money.

> Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before

With regards to loans, it is possible for state governments to establish regional public land loan offices to issue equity loans in reference to the production and replacement cost of existent tangible personal property fixed or held on site without monitoring all of the purchases of movable personal property by the borrower to determine credit-worthiness. The borrower just has to prove there is some tangible artifact of personal property which exists, which the loan office can auction if the debt goes bad or write off if the artifact is destroyed.

We just have to mandate the loan offices don't do something stupid, like issue loans against the excess value of real estate attributable land scarcity and resell mortgages to private investors which will resell derivatives, to avoid generating a real estate bubble and the accumulation of $100+ trillion in derivatives. Additionally we'd probably need to replace many regressive taxes with distributive land taxes to ensure that households and cooperatives had cheaper access to land in order to obtain a deed or long term lease granting the security for spatially fixed personal property necessary to qualify for such loans.

Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free.

The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.

With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.

That said, I totally agree about company phones and email addresses - those are under employer control and so could never be trusted, which is why the side-channel would be something like an unofficial WhatsApp group of a few co-workers who know each other well. Brain implants are not part of the threat model just yet, and I was sharing my observations purely in the context of my own recent experience.

Instead of building a hypertext website they could finance an ARPA-E program to develop new federated content publishing protocols. Then have the Department of Energy build out and maintain the initial cloud infrastructure as a public utility.

Any user files stored on network slices have the same legal and privacy protections as mail held at the United States Post Office, and people are free to store encrypted files using whatever encryption scheme they want in the same way that they are free to send pages of gibberish through the mail.

If DoE builds out a cloud network then DoD could also lease a portion of the infrastructure for JEDI.

HTTP is a request-response rather than content broadcast or publish-subscribe protocol. Presumably you could develop a publish-subscribe protocol with low-latency encryption support embedded in protocol layer similar to QUIC.

> if fediverse style apps take off the problem would just move to the most popular nodes on that network.

So suppose the Department of Energy provides a public cloud which people can get a network address to hold files for them similar to how they can get a Post Office box number at the post office. Except when you put a file in your own PO box the PO will make free copies of the file for others on your behalf which are subscribed to your PO box without destroying the original copy.

This would really just create a lower-level protocol or new number system for publish-subscribe content. It would compete with the other ARPAnet protocols such as TCP.

Tim Berners-Lee might get it right this next time around?

No, it doesn't really do anything to weaken the threshold.

If humans discover a method of warp travel which is then validated by peer review, this does not do anything to increase the reliability of claims made by the US Air Force concerning the existence and performance characteristics of UAPs.

The reliability of the later claims are limited by the fact that there is no independent observation and verification from non-military sources, and due to the fact that former USAF employees such as Richard Doty have claimed they were hired to fabricate and provide false information to independent UFO researchers as part of a domestic counter-intelligence operation.

My point is that if a theoretical model for a warp drive emerges that provides falsifiable hypotheses in terms of what an external observer ought to see, this could be a useful tool for scientists to use if/when they are given the underlying UAP data I expect to see the government hand over the next 12-18 months.

The threshold I am referring to is when the theory becomes cohesive enough to provide such a tool for being able to generate such explanations, as opposed to the threshold where it could lead to actual applied physics.

There is the hyper-libertarian argument which says that if someone arrives at a hospital unconcious, and the hospital bills them the maximum amount they estimate the patient can pay before bankruptcy, so the hospital can maximize initially reported earnings before writing down unpaid debts, that this is somehow a voluntarily market price as long as the hospital is private and not owned by the government, because value is purely subjective and has no relation to cost.

Then there is the other argument which says if hospitals are over-billing people which are under duress, that this is bad and we want to do something about it, but we don't want to immediately nationalize healthcare and ban private health insurance. This second type of conservatism usually focuses on price controls or regulation of monopolies.

With pricing transparency regulations, it's probably possible to implement universal public price negotiation by fining non-elective healthcare providers which bill patients over 100% of their previously published price or 120% of the minimum price published by comparable providers. Then rebate patients the entire amount they were over-billed regardless of their insurance status.

With over-billing rebates there is less need to collect payroll tax to finance social insurance premiums. Need based assistance could be financed from more progressive property taxes on the rich, and the actual price controls could be implemented relatively cheaply by randomly auditing providers to ensure compliance, by allowing patients to manually submit invoices whenever they felt they were over-billed, and by financing rebates to patients entirely from fines on providers.

It's certainly possible that other systems would work better. However if we want to be nuanced there are many different strands of U.S. conservatism. Historically U.S. conservatives subscribed to some form of cost or labor theory of value. The kind of hyper-libertarian conservative movement which says private prices are always fair is probably less than 100 years old.

For instance if a provider billed a patient over 100% of their stated price or over 120% the minimum price for the same item published by comparable providers, there might be some public fine or tax on the biller and rebate to the patient in proportion to the entire amount by which the patient was over-billed regardless of their insurance status.

This would possibly amount to something similar to universal public price negotiation.

But yes the idea of using pricing transparency to suppress over-billing by monopolies could possibly be interpreted as suggesting a rejection of the alternative idea of centrally fixing all consumer facing prices using a public office and then determining all government facing prices from external suppliers providing necessary inputs for the public healthcare system through minimum bid.