My friend Jason was recently musing on the possibility of legislating firms to employ a certain number of people, based on revenue, in order to slow the pace of automation and the joblessness it leads to. I get that there's a problem,because no matter how good state provision for joblessness might be, firms contribute only a small part (if any) to the costs of supporting the workers they fire. Jason's idea is essentially an additional tax on firms to offset the costs of joblessness by creating unnecessary jobs. In my view there's a far better way; tax firms more, and spend some of the proceeds on a universal basic income.

One million webmentions. Very pleased to have played my own tiny part in this.

@cn suggested I use the date as the title of a Post in Known, to ensure that the contents of the post gets through to micro.blog intact, and, as so often, he is correct.

All I have to do now is remember to salute him next #micromonday

For all the joy of the #indieweb, and the pleasure of civil discourse, I am becoming incredibly confused by aspects of micro.blog. There’s the question of titleless posts, of which is this is one as an experiment, versus status updates. There are posts that appear to be contributions to an interesting conversation but aren’t because they have been cross-posted automatically from elsewhere. And there is the lack of a scroll back, which means that as I follow more people and choose not to check in the middle of my night, stuff vanishes irretrievably from my timeline. 

There are also issues with Known that are nothing to do with micro.blog.

None of this is insurmountable. For me, though, it does add friction.