The best union, in my opinion is the one that you're threatening to form.
Well said. I like the idea of unions, but somehow they often just turn into an extra layer of bureaucracy making tough decisions tougher, and getting in the way of employees doing what they want to do, all in the name of a perceived fairness. This is why I usually advocate right-to-work laws, because they add an incentive for the unions to stay working in the employee's favor, rather than just getting embroiled in power struggles.
But the idea that the NSA is sucking up and storing forever my emails, my phone records, my financial records, hell, the logs of every time and location my 13-year old niece has called for pizza...that is what was absurd. Completely, bonkers insane and absurd.
And nobody's denying that it's absurd, not even the NSA. They're trying hard to avoid saying it, but yeah, I'm sure the NSA knows exactly how ridiculous the whole thing is...
To me, to you, to my wife, to my mom, to my sister, to my brother, to my nieces and nephews.
Of course they are, because you, me, your wife, your mom, your sister, your brother, or your nieces or nephews may be the next Unabomber, or the next McVeigh. Sure, you know they're safe and reasonable enough, but the NSA doesn't. All the NSA knows at this point is that your neice's phone just called a guy who recently purchased a half-ton of fertilizer, and "she" supposedly ordered a "pizza".
Of course, the guy could just be interested in growing his own produce for his latest culinary masterpiece. On the other hand, your niece's cell phone may have been stolen to distribute orders in a coordinated attack. Before such an attack, the government can't know, because we don't have adequate enough surveillance for that yet. After the attack, though, it's pretty easy to look at the pizza guy's records and see that he's ordered fertilizer every spring for the past decade, and to consider that the phone was then used to check on upcoming Bieber tour dates... and your niece is not a suspect any more; no warrant needed.
The NSA is following the same approach as Big Data companies: Gather everything, and expect to need only a tiny amount of it. What's most objectionable to me is that this is secret. Personally, I'd love to be secure in the knowledge that I have a big searchable database of my activities ripe for subpoena. A highly-accurate and relatively-complete record of all my informational activities? It's better trial evidence than DNA. Of course, so as not to defeat the security aspects, such evidence should be reviewed in secret by a judge before each use, but now we're getting into implementation details.
Such a database could be used against citizens, though... It's far too easy to blur the line from "investigator" to "enforcer". That's the gist of this article, though. Snowden said that anybody can search for anybody, without needing a warrant. That's also objectionable... It'd be better if the database had a mechanism to log searches and their authorizations, so the fourth amendment can be respected without crippling our investigative abilities.
That's because, for all practical purposes, unions are corporations who supply labor by (usually exclusive) contract. The same incentives to collude exist for them as for any other company. If you don't accept their contract on their terms, every other union will oppose you and impede business.
Profit and pursuit of personal happiness (even at the expense of others) is an ideal in itself. It might not be a very socially-friendly one, but it's an ideal nonetheless.
No matter what country you're from or what your political ideals are, it is never okay to "not support the troops".
The troops are people who have put themselves in harm's way to fight for their ideals. That is a commendable quality, regardless of what those ideals are. You are, however, perfectly free to oppose those ideals and promote your own. You are perfectly free to vote for pacifist politicians and to openly protest wars, but do not confuse the war with the people fighting in it.
My wife's Android phone does that to every charger except the one it came with, leading me to believe it's the phone's detection that's wrong, not the charger.
What is the charger for an Android phone? Oh right, a standard USB cable. What is the charger for an Apple product?
Half a standard USB cable, and the other half a denser connector. The cable isn't important, though. What matters is the adapter it plugs into, and that's what Apple is claiming.
Long story short, Apple and other brand-name chargers produce fairly well-regulated power that's very unlikely to do things like short out or explode. Cheaper options use cheaper circuits that aren't as well-designed, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
Not to sound dismissive, but that's an implementation detail. PGP uses a system of partial trust, though its particular implementation I don't know.
I do recall some (long-outdated) research into this particular problem, where a trust network didn't simply have "trust" or "do not trust". Rather, it maintained a percentage of trust - Each hop in a chain decreased the total trust in the chain, but each separate path increased it. At the end of the chain, the client could compute exactly how much a particular server should be trusted, based on the whole network.
I work in finance. Until recently, my company had several million dollars being controlled through a bank whose website required exactly 6-character passwords, which they'd happily send to you in plaintext via email if you forgot it.
No, I do not want to trust banks with information security.
Instead of handing out tickets, they could park conspicuously and therefore force everyone to slow down so everyone's doing the limit on that stretch of road.
I grew up in a nice bit of farmland, and for a while a nearby town had a single officer, on duty 9am-5pm. From earlier and busier times, the town had a whopping three patrol cars - the nice big Crown Vics with the full-size light bar that any driver with enough vision to drive could see from several miles down the town's one main road. During a particularly bad summer tourist season, that one cop started moving the cars to good locations just inside the town limits. They'd be parked on dirveways (with permission) or lots where they wouldn't be in the way, with just enough cover to look like they were trying to hide, but not enough cover to do so effectively.
It worked. Traffic usually slowed down, and the one officer could spend his limited time watching from the one stoplight in the town center.
With a self signed cert, you cant verify the identity of the signer/cert.
Correct, and that's really all you're paying for when you buy a certificate from a CA: You pay enough money and provide enough documentation that they're confident you are who you say you are.
With the possibility of a compromised CA, you have (essentially) the same problem.
Almost correct. You can't really verify the identity, but your computer won't really even try because it trusts the compromised CA. The solution is to check revocation lists, but there are problems with that.
What I would like to know is what (if anything) can be done to verify keys without a CA?
Let each person be a CA. If I know you, I can sign your certificate myself. Anybody who knows me and trusts me would then trust you. Again, compromises are fixed by revocation and expiration, but the impact is somewhat less severe.
No. When a CA signs a certificate, they don't get the private key used for decryption. They just assert that a particular public key really does belong to who it says.
If the NSA has Verisign's key, for example, they'd be able to do two things:
decrypt traffic sent to Versign, which isn't very useful in itself
Create and sign their own certificates as though they were Verisign.
The latter is where the man-in-the-middle attack comes in. The NSA can claim to be whoever you're trying to reach, and the certificate will look valid and be trusted by default on any system that trusts Verisign. On the other hand, a self-signed certificate isn't signed by anybody else. The NSA doesn't need anyone else's private keys to make their own and claim to be anyone. The client will see the certificate, ask you if you trust it, and unless you're in the habit of memorizing certificate fingerprints, you won't notice a difference. Once any certificate is trusted (either by default or by your acceptance), your traffic will be sent to (and decrypted by) the certificate holder.
This is actually already a problem. CAs have been compromised, and their stolen credentials have been used to sign certificates claiming to be governments, Microsoft, and other generally-trusted sites. The apparently-trusted certificates are then used to make scams look more legitimate.
Sweden is a welfare state, not a socialist state. The two concepts are closely related, since the goal of state-owned corporations is usually public welfare, but Sweden is not really politically socialist.
But you don't need fast Internet access, though. Dial-up might be too slow to be mentioned today, but low-end DSL is still available across practically the whole country. Stuck in the hands of politicians, I'd expect improvement plans to roll around once every few years when elections are coming up, then be quickly forgotten when budgets are due. We'd have the same crappy service we do now, but with extra bureaucracy.
In fact, it is much like local water services. My home town's water system spent 20 years with usage restrictions each summer, because no politician wanted to be responsible for the expense of upgrades. It wasn't until a private company built a new facility and donated a whole new pump system and water tower that the upgrade finally happened. What we had
The incentive to improve is undermined by the lack of competition. Normally, a company must offer better service than its competitors, but today there's nobody else in the game. With only a couple providers allowed in each community, and an implicit collusion between them, there is no need to improve.
That's why I'd rather see a new competitor that the current players are required to support, that also sets a minimum level of service. Rankings like this don't mean much to private ISPs, but they're noticed by Congress, who can then raise that minimum level. At that point, the private companies must either improve their own service to match (and support the government-mandated service), or lose customers (and pay even more to support the government subscribers they can't attract).
I'm advocating a monopoly-free solution where the government is a player that effectively replaces some regulation laws with market share. It's not a pure free market, because the government is applying market pressure and direction. It's not really libertarian, because the ISPs are also being required to support the government with bandwidth.
Of course, since it's advocating a private enterprise, it's not really socialism, either. I guess I'm just not an extremist. Go figure.
I prefer that the government handle civil services, but at my option. In essence, the government is a fallback option to ensure a minimum level of service. If the private companies can't even manage to do better than the bureaucrats, they don't deserve the competition-free market. This style of socialism is different from true socialism, where the government owns all businesses and the public only has one (generally bad) choice.
As for the "liberal" term, that's an American lie. I just prefer one particular style of having my freedom curtailed. The style I prefer is where I am, generally speaking, not free to harm others (even indirectly), but otherwise I can do what I want. This is in contrast to being "conservative", which generally holds that people should be free to create their own lives, and any misfortune (even indirectly caused by someone else) in one's life is due to a personal failure to properly prepare for or respond to such an event.
As a socialism-loving liberal, I have to say that I find the idea of an ISP utility ludicrous at best.
Social services are appropriate where there is an absolute goal. We don't want houses on fire, we don't want criminals running around uncaught, and we don't want roads to decay, just because such services are unprofitable. Civilization has an absolute need for those civil services. However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure. We'll mostly just be stuck with whatever minimum service the politicians find acceptable, and the infrastructure budget will go toward filling the requisite layers of bureaucrats.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity (not that they've been actually doing so). By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market. Unfortunately, we seem to have hit an impasse where the only options in a region are "crappy cable" or "crappy DSL", thanks to government-granted monopolies in communities.
So why not both? I say we void all community monopoly agreements, and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback. If my community's ISP options are too slow or too expensive, I can instead pay some standard rate for government service, which would go over the ISP's lines anyway. The local ISP still has to carry my traffic, but they don't get my money. The downside is that I'm stuck with whatever basic service the government decides is suitable.
No feminist would ever make a stupid argument like this...
...And that sounds a lot like No True Scotsman.
Sadly, I've personally heard actual feminists make equally-stupid arguments. One particular instance I recall was discrediting a physical-fitness study because it separated male and female participants. The study's conclusion had nothing to do with gender differences, but segregating the samples eliminated a variable. That didn't matter to the opposing extremist, though. She argued that since the male and female results were separated, each group was therefore subject to different biases, and the whole study should be rejected because it was "clearly" just a piece of propaganda to further the myth that men are physically superior to women.
Of course, in the actual study, there were a good many outliers that overlapped. Speaking of outliers, there are also extremists on all sides of an argument, even the ones with supposed moral high ground. Such extremists should be ignored as an anomaly, and the real science can go on uninterrupted.
From the sell-them-all scenario: 38096 * $810 + 1904 * $600 = $32,000,160. Selling one more at the $600 level means they miss their goal.
From the sell-as-few-as-possible scenario: 39507 * $810 = $32,000,670. They can only have 493 phones unsold at the end of the campaign for it to meet the goal.
With regards to the necessary correction, I need to work on my remembering-numbers-while-switching-tabs skills.
...is orthogonal to crowdsourcing. Under capitalism, individuals own property. That's it. They're free to use that property (including money) to make more money if they so choose, or they can make their own deals to trade for something else. With crowdfunding, a bunch of people put their money into a pool that is then used to fulfill some purpose, such as tooling manufacturers and setting up supply lines to produce a phone.
This does not require a middleman, and in fact the exact same model is used to start practically every corporate partnership: Several individuals pool their resources to fulfill some goal... Perhaps one guy rents the storefront, another buys the supplies, and a third handles the paperwork, resulting in a 3-person partnership to run a store. The only difference is that now there are several middlemen (Kickstarter and IndieGoGo being two) who will take a small commission to connect thousands of investors with the managers. The model is still the same: One guy handles paperwork, one guy arranges for suppliers, and 40,000 other investors chip in cash.
The "trinket" they receive is the return on their investment. Perhaps it's a phone, or their name on a satellite, or even just the personal satisfaction of seeing something made. These are not new deals. Prior to crowdfunding, patrons would simply pay artists out of their own pocket to produce works, or gather together in groups (such as the Lions Club, or Rotary, or various church groups) to pay for something they couldn't afford on their own.
There is absolutely no requirement that an investment's goal be to make more money. An investment is merely a resource put towards any particular goal.
Yeah, ok, "risk capital to make bank" hasn't been capitalism since the first limited liability corporation was set up, but at least there was some semblance of risk.
That's exactly what the limited libility leaves at risk: what's been invested, and nothing more. The limit on liability means that the company is its own legal entity, and if it's the target of a lawsuit, the owners' separate personal resources aren't at risk. The invested capital is still at risk, but the investor isn't required to be 100% at risk. If an airplane manufacturer goes bankrupt, the owner isn't still contractually obligated to fulfill orders for planes.
In order to meet the target, they have to sell at least 38096 of those 40,000 phones after the first day, and 1906 on the first. They have to sell at least 39,507 of them to meet their goal, if they're all at the higher price.
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The best union, in my opinion is the one that you're threatening to form.
Well said. I like the idea of unions, but somehow they often just turn into an extra layer of bureaucracy making tough decisions tougher, and getting in the way of employees doing what they want to do, all in the name of a perceived fairness. This is why I usually advocate right-to-work laws, because they add an incentive for the unions to stay working in the employee's favor, rather than just getting embroiled in power struggles.
But the idea that the NSA is sucking up and storing forever my emails, my phone records, my financial records, hell, the logs of every time and location my 13-year old niece has called for pizza...that is what was absurd. Completely, bonkers insane and absurd.
And nobody's denying that it's absurd, not even the NSA. They're trying hard to avoid saying it, but yeah, I'm sure the NSA knows exactly how ridiculous the whole thing is...
To me, to you, to my wife, to my mom, to my sister, to my brother, to my nieces and nephews.
Of course they are, because you, me, your wife, your mom, your sister, your brother, or your nieces or nephews may be the next Unabomber, or the next McVeigh. Sure, you know they're safe and reasonable enough, but the NSA doesn't. All the NSA knows at this point is that your neice's phone just called a guy who recently purchased a half-ton of fertilizer, and "she" supposedly ordered a "pizza".
Of course, the guy could just be interested in growing his own produce for his latest culinary masterpiece. On the other hand, your niece's cell phone may have been stolen to distribute orders in a coordinated attack. Before such an attack, the government can't know, because we don't have adequate enough surveillance for that yet. After the attack, though, it's pretty easy to look at the pizza guy's records and see that he's ordered fertilizer every spring for the past decade, and to consider that the phone was then used to check on upcoming Bieber tour dates... and your niece is not a suspect any more; no warrant needed.
The NSA is following the same approach as Big Data companies: Gather everything, and expect to need only a tiny amount of it. What's most objectionable to me is that this is secret. Personally, I'd love to be secure in the knowledge that I have a big searchable database of my activities ripe for subpoena. A highly-accurate and relatively-complete record of all my informational activities? It's better trial evidence than DNA. Of course, so as not to defeat the security aspects, such evidence should be reviewed in secret by a judge before each use, but now we're getting into implementation details.
Such a database could be used against citizens, though... It's far too easy to blur the line from "investigator" to "enforcer". That's the gist of this article, though. Snowden said that anybody can search for anybody, without needing a warrant. That's also objectionable... It'd be better if the database had a mechanism to log searches and their authorizations, so the fourth amendment can be respected without crippling our investigative abilities.
That's because, for all practical purposes, unions are corporations who supply labor by (usually exclusive) contract. The same incentives to collude exist for them as for any other company. If you don't accept their contract on their terms, every other union will oppose you and impede business.
Profit and pursuit of personal happiness (even at the expense of others) is an ideal in itself. It might not be a very socially-friendly one, but it's an ideal nonetheless.
No matter what country you're from or what your political ideals are, it is never okay to "not support the troops".
The troops are people who have put themselves in harm's way to fight for their ideals. That is a commendable quality, regardless of what those ideals are. You are, however, perfectly free to oppose those ideals and promote your own. You are perfectly free to vote for pacifist politicians and to openly protest wars, but do not confuse the war with the people fighting in it.
My wife's Android phone does that to every charger except the one it came with, leading me to believe it's the phone's detection that's wrong, not the charger.
What is the charger for an Android phone? Oh right, a standard USB cable. What is the charger for an Apple product?
Half a standard USB cable, and the other half a denser connector. The cable isn't important, though. What matters is the adapter it plugs into, and that's what Apple is claiming.
Long story short, Apple and other brand-name chargers produce fairly well-regulated power that's very unlikely to do things like short out or explode. Cheaper options use cheaper circuits that aren't as well-designed, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
Not to sound dismissive, but that's an implementation detail. PGP uses a system of partial trust, though its particular implementation I don't know.
I do recall some (long-outdated) research into this particular problem, where a trust network didn't simply have "trust" or "do not trust". Rather, it maintained a percentage of trust - Each hop in a chain decreased the total trust in the chain, but each separate path increased it. At the end of the chain, the client could compute exactly how much a particular server should be trusted, based on the whole network.
I work in finance. Until recently, my company had several million dollars being controlled through a bank whose website required exactly 6-character passwords, which they'd happily send to you in plaintext via email if you forgot it.
No, I do not want to trust banks with information security.
Instead of handing out tickets, they could park conspicuously and therefore force everyone to slow down so everyone's doing the limit on that stretch of road.
I grew up in a nice bit of farmland, and for a while a nearby town had a single officer, on duty 9am-5pm. From earlier and busier times, the town had a whopping three patrol cars - the nice big Crown Vics with the full-size light bar that any driver with enough vision to drive could see from several miles down the town's one main road. During a particularly bad summer tourist season, that one cop started moving the cars to good locations just inside the town limits. They'd be parked on dirveways (with permission) or lots where they wouldn't be in the way, with just enough cover to look like they were trying to hide, but not enough cover to do so effectively.
It worked. Traffic usually slowed down, and the one officer could spend his limited time watching from the one stoplight in the town center.
How do your users know that the certificate you sent them is really from you?
With a self signed cert, you cant verify the identity of the signer/cert.
Correct, and that's really all you're paying for when you buy a certificate from a CA: You pay enough money and provide enough documentation that they're confident you are who you say you are.
With the possibility of a compromised CA, you have (essentially) the same problem.
Almost correct. You can't really verify the identity, but your computer won't really even try because it trusts the compromised CA. The solution is to check revocation lists, but there are problems with that.
What I would like to know is what (if anything) can be done to verify keys without a CA?
Let each person be a CA. If I know you, I can sign your certificate myself. Anybody who knows me and trusts me would then trust you. Again, compromises are fixed by revocation and expiration, but the impact is somewhat less severe.
No. When a CA signs a certificate, they don't get the private key used for decryption. They just assert that a particular public key really does belong to who it says.
If the NSA has Verisign's key, for example, they'd be able to do two things:
The latter is where the man-in-the-middle attack comes in. The NSA can claim to be whoever you're trying to reach, and the certificate will look valid and be trusted by default on any system that trusts Verisign. On the other hand, a self-signed certificate isn't signed by anybody else. The NSA doesn't need anyone else's private keys to make their own and claim to be anyone. The client will see the certificate, ask you if you trust it, and unless you're in the habit of memorizing certificate fingerprints, you won't notice a difference. Once any certificate is trusted (either by default or by your acceptance), your traffic will be sent to (and decrypted by) the certificate holder.
This is actually already a problem. CAs have been compromised, and their stolen credentials have been used to sign certificates claiming to be governments, Microsoft, and other generally-trusted sites. The apparently-trusted certificates are then used to make scams look more legitimate.
Sweden is a welfare state, not a socialist state. The two concepts are closely related, since the goal of state-owned corporations is usually public welfare, but Sweden is not really politically socialist.
But you don't need fast Internet access, though. Dial-up might be too slow to be mentioned today, but low-end DSL is still available across practically the whole country. Stuck in the hands of politicians, I'd expect improvement plans to roll around once every few years when elections are coming up, then be quickly forgotten when budgets are due. We'd have the same crappy service we do now, but with extra bureaucracy.
In fact, it is much like local water services. My home town's water system spent 20 years with usage restrictions each summer, because no politician wanted to be responsible for the expense of upgrades. It wasn't until a private company built a new facility and donated a whole new pump system and water tower that the upgrade finally happened. What we had
The incentive to improve is undermined by the lack of competition. Normally, a company must offer better service than its competitors, but today there's nobody else in the game. With only a couple providers allowed in each community, and an implicit collusion between them, there is no need to improve.
That's why I'd rather see a new competitor that the current players are required to support, that also sets a minimum level of service. Rankings like this don't mean much to private ISPs, but they're noticed by Congress, who can then raise that minimum level. At that point, the private companies must either improve their own service to match (and support the government-mandated service), or lose customers (and pay even more to support the government subscribers they can't attract).
I'm advocating a monopoly-free solution where the government is a player that effectively replaces some regulation laws with market share. It's not a pure free market, because the government is applying market pressure and direction. It's not really libertarian, because the ISPs are also being required to support the government with bandwidth.
Of course, since it's advocating a private enterprise, it's not really socialism, either. I guess I'm just not an extremist. Go figure.
I prefer that the government handle civil services, but at my option. In essence, the government is a fallback option to ensure a minimum level of service. If the private companies can't even manage to do better than the bureaucrats, they don't deserve the competition-free market. This style of socialism is different from true socialism, where the government owns all businesses and the public only has one (generally bad) choice.
As for the "liberal" term, that's an American lie. I just prefer one particular style of having my freedom curtailed. The style I prefer is where I am, generally speaking, not free to harm others (even indirectly), but otherwise I can do what I want. This is in contrast to being "conservative", which generally holds that people should be free to create their own lives, and any misfortune (even indirectly caused by someone else) in one's life is due to a personal failure to properly prepare for or respond to such an event.
As a socialism-loving liberal, I have to say that I find the idea of an ISP utility ludicrous at best.
Social services are appropriate where there is an absolute goal. We don't want houses on fire, we don't want criminals running around uncaught, and we don't want roads to decay, just because such services are unprofitable. Civilization has an absolute need for those civil services. However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure. We'll mostly just be stuck with whatever minimum service the politicians find acceptable, and the infrastructure budget will go toward filling the requisite layers of bureaucrats.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity (not that they've been actually doing so). By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market. Unfortunately, we seem to have hit an impasse where the only options in a region are "crappy cable" or "crappy DSL", thanks to government-granted monopolies in communities.
So why not both? I say we void all community monopoly agreements, and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback. If my community's ISP options are too slow or too expensive, I can instead pay some standard rate for government service, which would go over the ISP's lines anyway. The local ISP still has to carry my traffic, but they don't get my money. The downside is that I'm stuck with whatever basic service the government decides is suitable.
A perfect sig.
No feminist would ever make a stupid argument like this...
...And that sounds a lot like No True Scotsman.
Sadly, I've personally heard actual feminists make equally-stupid arguments. One particular instance I recall was discrediting a physical-fitness study because it separated male and female participants. The study's conclusion had nothing to do with gender differences, but segregating the samples eliminated a variable. That didn't matter to the opposing extremist, though. She argued that since the male and female results were separated, each group was therefore subject to different biases, and the whole study should be rejected because it was "clearly" just a piece of propaganda to further the myth that men are physically superior to women.
Of course, in the actual study, there were a good many outliers that overlapped. Speaking of outliers, there are also extremists on all sides of an argument, even the ones with supposed moral high ground. Such extremists should be ignored as an anomaly, and the real science can go on uninterrupted.
From the sell-them-all scenario: 38096 * $810 + 1904 * $600 = $32,000,160. Selling one more at the $600 level means they miss their goal.
From the sell-as-few-as-possible scenario: 39507 * $810 = $32,000,670. They can only have 493 phones unsold at the end of the campaign for it to meet the goal.
With regards to the necessary correction, I need to work on my remembering-numbers-while-switching-tabs skills.
I don't really understand the crowdfunding craze.
Yeah, that's pretty clear.
The idea with capitalism...
...is orthogonal to crowdsourcing. Under capitalism, individuals own property. That's it. They're free to use that property (including money) to make more money if they so choose, or they can make their own deals to trade for something else. With crowdfunding, a bunch of people put their money into a pool that is then used to fulfill some purpose, such as tooling manufacturers and setting up supply lines to produce a phone.
This does not require a middleman, and in fact the exact same model is used to start practically every corporate partnership: Several individuals pool their resources to fulfill some goal... Perhaps one guy rents the storefront, another buys the supplies, and a third handles the paperwork, resulting in a 3-person partnership to run a store. The only difference is that now there are several middlemen (Kickstarter and IndieGoGo being two) who will take a small commission to connect thousands of investors with the managers. The model is still the same: One guy handles paperwork, one guy arranges for suppliers, and 40,000 other investors chip in cash.
The "trinket" they receive is the return on their investment. Perhaps it's a phone, or their name on a satellite, or even just the personal satisfaction of seeing something made. These are not new deals. Prior to crowdfunding, patrons would simply pay artists out of their own pocket to produce works, or gather together in groups (such as the Lions Club, or Rotary, or various church groups) to pay for something they couldn't afford on their own.
There is absolutely no requirement that an investment's goal be to make more money. An investment is merely a resource put towards any particular goal.
Yeah, ok, "risk capital to make bank" hasn't been capitalism since the first limited liability corporation was set up, but at least there was some semblance of risk.
That's exactly what the limited libility leaves at risk: what's been invested, and nothing more. The limit on liability means that the company is its own legal entity, and if it's the target of a lawsuit, the owners' separate personal resources aren't at risk. The invested capital is still at risk, but the investor isn't required to be 100% at risk. If an airplane manufacturer goes bankrupt, the owner isn't still contractually obligated to fulfill orders for planes.
1904 on the first day, I mean.
In order to meet the target, they have to sell at least 38096 of those 40,000 phones after the first day, and 1906 on the first. They have to sell at least 39,507 of them to meet their goal, if they're all at the higher price.
Ambitious goals.