Will the city accept these local currencies to pay for a zoning fee or a business license? For the water, electric or trash bill from the municipally owned utility? If not, then it's the muni-gov equivalent of a LARP.

Why does Bill Gates have a "foundation" instead of just a foundation?

Uber classifies (and pays) its drivers as independent contractors. California disagrees, but Texas, so far, does not. And you can have any barrier you want -- pay for your uniform, pay for a car no older than X, whatever -- with an indie contractor.

Does your field (which sounds like app development) allow you to charge a premium rate so you can drive down the number of hours worked? Solo shops and microshops in other professional services (like PR/marketing) essentially plan on only 50% billable time, with the remainder going to biz-dev and a little admin.

But for that to work at a decent salary equivalence, your hourly rate (or equivalent if you do fixed-fee work) needs to be $100 an hour or more. Is that reasonable in your field?

China's energy needs -- in terms of year-over-year growth -- dwarf those of any other country. Their regulatory processes, for projects that the state deems necessary, can be incredibly streamlined. AND they've got money to spend. It's no surprise they're the hotspot for all kinds of energy investment -- clean and otherwise.

I don't think advertisers have an inalienable right to anything -- if this battle turns legal, it won't be advertisers suing end users or adblock developers.

But would advertisers sue publishers or content owners if the size and nature of the audience was fundamentally misrepresented? Oh, yeah -- that already happens in the offline media world.

That threat, if it becomes more commonplace, puts pressure on publishers to make sure those ads get seen. And that's where the trouble for end users could occur.

(It's also one reason Google's pay-per-click ad revolution shook things up so much: As an advertiser, you don't care if the ad was seen 10 times or 10 million times as long as you're getting the clickthrough rate you want and ONLY paying for that clickthrough rate. As someone else in the thread said: People who use Adblock don't click on ads, so the pay-per-click model actually helps perpetuate the current state of things by taking pressure off of publishers to deliver raw impression numbers.)

Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.

Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.

If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.

He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.

Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.

You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.

The risk isn't worth it to you.

And that's OK -- but that doesn't mean it's a blanket risk assessment for everyone. Failure is always an option, whether you're holding down a desk and a w-2 paycheck or hunting and killing your own food.

Pedantic, I know -- but in the U.S., think tanks are generally not-for-profits set up to do research and advocacy. Stratfor is a for-profit business.

More accurately: A large part of America stubbornly refuses to trust government solutions.

I don't think an innate trust of corporations is what you see nearly as much as an innate distrust of government not to screw stuff up.

Not advocating for that position or against it; just sayin' that's how it looks out here in the heartland.

Labor laws don't recognize any difference in wage or work standards between for-profit and non-profit companies.