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*Updated: Mr. Guillot AKA yankprintster (4225) responded and is interested in answering some questions. Ask him your questions below in the comments*
B.J. Guillot is one of three candidates currently seeking to represent Washington's 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Guillot is also a reader of SoylentNews. In a recent interview with CoinTelegraph about his enthusiastic support of cryptocurrency, Mr. Guillot was asked "When did you first hear about Bitcoin, and when did you get into it?" He explains that he got turned on to Bitcoin while reading a certain news for nerds site, and then mentions:
Since I have the floor, let me just state for the record, the new Slashdot web design and user experience is really poor. I've since moved on to SoylentNews.org for my daily science and tech news.
Perhaps Mr. Guillot would be kind enough to answer a few questions about his positions on topics of particular concern to the SN community. I invite him to answer directly in the comments below, or if he would prefer, I will collect and forward the highest-modded comments to Mr. Guillot, and then submit a new story with his responses.
According to his campaign website, Mr. Guillot holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, and has software development experience.
The Crypto Crimson reports that while many politicians are "quick to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon" following the U.S. Federal Election Commission's recent opinon declaring that political committes may accept contributions in the form of Bitcoin, unlike these other politicians, Mr. Guillot is an active miner who "currently achiev[es] a hashrate of five Terahash per Second - certainly the fastest bitcoin mining politician".
The top item to appear in the "Issues" section of Mr. Guillot's campaign website is "NSA Spying". Mr. Guillot's stated positon on this issue is: "The Federal Government needs to immediately stop its spying and metadata collection of its citizen's phone calls and emails. It's also time to discontinue the Patriot Act. No more extensions!".
On his campaign website, Mr. Guillot also states his positions on: "Internet Freedom", "Patent Reform", "Bitcoin", "National Debt", "FairTax", "Military", "Second Amendment", "Energy", and "Education".
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday July 09 2014, @05:50AM
Wow, first off, major props to you for coming and answering our questions. My guess is you had a meta-moment when SoylentNews ran an article about you liking SoylentNews; the staff consider this our first official interview (as I've learned running the site, you can never expect what's going to come out of the community :-)). We actually had a small traffic spike which broke the "unique visitors" record for the site.
Secondly, since the question train keeps going, would you mind if I took all the responses thus far, and turned them into an article and ran it? I can understand it can be tiring fielding questions all day. If there's one thing I learned from this site, it's always important to keep a discussion going, and this is a pretty good place to get various bits of insight; with your approval, I'll stick it in the queue for Wednesday or Thursday.
Anyway, having gone through the pain of incorporating a business as of late, I'm curious on your opinions with respect the internet and small businesses. The fact is, business law in the United States is still firmly stepped in the concept that a business is a location in one state that buys or sells goods from a physical location, and is (generally) for profit. While I realize this falls under the realm of state law more than federal, the fact is, forming a business that (more or less) exists solely on the internet is shockingly difficult, especially if one is not operating on the basis of profit. Due to the strict limitations on non-for-profit, without the public benefit corporation laws in Delaware (and other states), it was quite possible we'd still be floundering figuring out how to do it. Even now, we still are unable to directly fundraise due to state laws requiring that the corporation be licensed in each individual state (something that I would think would fall under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and thus within Congresses authority). Put simply, do you feel, as they exist today, the rules and regulations are sufficient for businesses (especially those related to PBCs, not for profit, and 501(c)(3)) that primarily exist in digital form, and if not, where do you feel that reform is necessary?
My next question is about dealing a follow up to your comments on impeachment. As you stated "I personally feel impeachment talk is just political theater.", and I can understand the sentiment, given how rarely impeachment happens in the United States (twice with presidents, with Nixon likely to have been impeached had he not resigned), do you feel that there is sufficient means for Congress (and the general public in large) to provide oversight and take corrective actions when necessary? While the House and Senate do have means to deal with issues internally (such as censure of McCarthy), they are very rarely used. Furthermore, given the opportunity to reform impeachment and other similar measures, what type of changes would you make to make it less of a political theatre, and more as a reasonable tool to reign in elected or appointed officials.
Finally, and this is with my site admin hat on, how would you recommend us structuring future interviews on the site. Slashdot traditionally went with "Ask a bunch of questions, we'll pick the best, and post the answers", while Reddit has its "Ask Me Anything" and "I Am A" sections which serve much the same purpose. This has managed to be a fusion of both, but in a very ad-hoc way. This discussion has prompted us (the staff) to work out an actual policy and format for doing interviews which are both interesting for the reader, and engaging for the writer; as you said, the right thing to do is to read feedback and respond, and we want to be an excellent forum to do so. Since you are our pilot test case, I'd love to get feedback on how we can improve it.
Anyway, thanks for your time on behalf of the SoylentNews Staff and myself, and I hope you keep enjoying the site for many more years to come :-). I might ask more questions later, but I think these are probably difficult enough for now.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by yankprintster on Thursday July 10 2014, @12:58AM
Yeah, an article would be cool. There were only a few new questions I saw today, and I've running short on time today, so I might have to come back tomorrow to address them, or if you'd rather try to do it differently for the follow-up that's fine too. We can do whatever works best with your newly drafted interview policies.