So is a compiler. Humanity is the conscious altering of nature.

What’s the legal way to arrange things on a shelf?

How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors incumbents or spammers depending on direction.

Catalogs are ads.

But I already have email.

Because they’re useful and well liked by consumers?

Who actually likes gift cards, as in, would still use them despite better alternatives existing?

If giving/receiving cash wasn't already illegal or socially unacceptable, gift card issuers would have started lobbying for that yesterday.

Other than that original use case, many people use them as a form of poorly functional digital cash (since it's not fungible across issuers) that really ought to exist natively in a currency these days.

I regularly got dunkin donuts, starbucks and the like gift cards for less the face value (sometimes half of face) and therefore strongly preferred using them when I shopped at those stores (at least when I had a balance).

Don’t limit yourself to first order thinking. The proposed interest payment disincentivizes companies from seeking carried balances. Companies will implement refund mechanisms and streamline dark patterns at their own expense to avoid paying the interest.

I'd stick to first order thinking, thanks.

It's easy to get things wrong trying to do second order thinking, or just make things up.

There's no reason to believe companies would do as you say. There are several other options, including choosing different financial vehicles to store the users money, implementing even more dark patterns to store N% more money so they are even, or can improve their returns over the status quo.

Your entire second paragraph is second order. You can’t just ignore consequences in a policy debate.

yes, my second paragraph is second order to explain how there can be many many possibilities, not the one you wish would happen.

> You can’t just ignore consequences in a policy debate.

Consequences of consequences though, you can route almost any argument to any conclusion you want :)

Reasonable people have been disagreeing on that since at least the late 18th century.

In a practical sense the right place is wherever it gets passed. If the United States is an experiment every legal jurisdiction is a laboratory.

How does that prove I am the original author? Can't I just download a work and sign it as my own?

Let’s consider a scenario where you’ve published a video with a public key, and you have a history of using that key for publishing your work. If someone else were to download that video, they wouldn’t be able to sign it because they lack the key. I believe the same principle applies to PDFs and ebooks.

They wouldn’t be able to sign it as me but they could sign it as themselves, taking credit.

My question is what mechanism proves the video is signed by the rightful owner?

You're really giving credit in the wrong areas. Google is impressive for its ability to exist beyond the point of dysfunction. It's simply not the case that any Googler would need to verify the identity of any other any more than it is necessary for every server to verify the identity of every other. They only need to verify the identify of the tiny subset they are communicating with at any given time. This doesn't mean everyone has access to a coherent org chart, or that one even exists.

And how do they verify those of the subset they are in communication with?

Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?

> Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?

It's a hierarchical org chart. If you're really not sure ask Sundar.

It's likely any Googler can verify the identity of any other by looking up their username but it's unlikely that the same tool would do something like tell you how the YouTube recommendation algorithm works or who would know that.

They will know the names of frequent collaborators and something about the scope of relevant work but it's not like everyone at Google needs intimate knowledge of every workstream. At that scale it's unlikely anyone has the full picture.

Okay so we agree Google has a full org chart then somewhere.

We agree an org chart of some kind probably exists. We disagree on the capabilities. For example I am not confident that it has a concept of a team and if it does that a team would map to a product or feature.