Project Gutenberg – Library of over 60k free eBooks

Theres a lot of weird old stuff floating around, which might not be what you think of when you think "book" but were actually published as books.

For example, governments often publish tranacripts of votes.

It's great that these exist, and are being digitised for scholars and historians, but its not what you'd go to your local library for.

https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL258109A/United_States._Arm....

There have been lots of submissions of specific books, of course, but this is a nice general thread:

Obituary for Michael Stern Hart, Project Gutenberg Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971 - Sept 2011 (32 comments)

> Who is going to do the jobs that need doing but are not so pleasant - like washing dishes?

Generally this work can either be done by machines, it can be done by the people who are eating the food, it can be done in rotation by all people who participate in the system, or it can be done by people who feel like washing dishes is their way to contribute back to society. I am definitely a big fan of the idea that to make this work, we need to intentionally automate more stuff. Right now minimum wage is so low that capitalist organizations are happy to just throw bodies at the problem, but you could easily use durable dishes that feed in to a little mechanized washer. Such a system would also benefit from centralization, so there are lower numbers of larger facilities. Or you could have a spoke and hub model where the main processing equipment is in the center and different restaurants share that infrastructure.

Finally I will say that there is already an existence proof of a culture that does this every day. The Sikhs in India operate facilities all over India that offer free food on a large scale (the largest facilities offer 50k-100k free meals a day). They have zero robots and it all works out for them. I'm sure if we work in robots and also change our attitudes, we can do it here. Take a look at this video, it is beautiful and deeply thought provoking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdoJroKUwu0

> I also expect that making money is a prime motivator for artists, and also drives the quality of their work.

I think you would find few people in the art community who agree with this. I am not an artist but that is my speculation. Also if you look at historical art, I don't think money was a prime motivator. You could also look at basketball. Probably most basketball players play because they enjoy it. I suspect very few only do it because they plan to get rich. Oh, and I did not say we should eliminate money. Artists could make money if they want to. It would just not be required for survival.

There is an Australian version of this link: http://gutenberg.net.au . There are quite a few books there that are not in gutenberg.org because the Aus. version observes Australian copyright law. You won't find much R.A. Freeman, for example, in the parent but almost his entire œuvre can be found on the Aussie site.

A commune in isolation can not protect itself. Another more aggressive group will overtake them given time. That's why I don't believe that end-goal communism or anarchism could ever work (where the former is contrary to many people's idea, is about small communes, not some Big Government). But with a necessarily strong government it is absolutely not impossible to scale a small commune to a whole country. Pair it with the best kind of democracy (as that is an entirely different axis) we have and I also on the opinion that many of today's problems could be solved.

But even in today's capitalist system UBI could be implemented relatively easily paid for by tax money.