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> So you are saying that AI will let us work 10% less and retain the same pay and productivity?

In any sensible society yes, that would be it. But not in capitalism:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before[...] The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

(Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935, see also Wikipedia.

Capitalism, as we have today is just too stupid to cope with that problem and flees into more and more mass-production of less and less useful crap, at an exploding externalized cost: environment, civil society, whatever that has not a price tag or can be bribed.

I think Bertrand Russel draws some terrible conclusions, but he makes an astute observation as to why a 20 hour work week is unlikely in his essay In Praise of Idleness that he wrote over 80 years ago.

What we tend to see in the real world is that advances in technology still leave most people working approximately 40 hours per week, but an increase in the requirements for minimum capability to do useful work. It's not hard to imagine that as robots and AI continue to advance we may have a world where only people capable of earning a Ph.D. in scientific or medical fields are able to contribute to further human progress as every job below that can be automated and performed at far less expense or far greater safety than if done by a human.

I don't know what the eventual end result of this looks like, but we're starting to see how it plays out. IQ scores have been increasing at population levels and we're not entirely certain that all of those increases can be attributed to environment factors, so there may be some evidence that modern society is selecting for improved intelligence, but it's plane to see that there are some individuals even today who are incapable of doing productive work or adding value to society. Even if human reproduction could keep track with technological advancement, it still doesn't solve the problems that arise when someone who has been specially trained for a particular vocation that they have worked in for several decades has had their job made redundant as even exceptionally intelligent people can struggle to adapt to new things as they age.

The idea only works if you assume all individuals are equally capable, which isn't true. What happens is that labor-saving techniques or machines replace the least skilled workers who were doing 40 hours of work. Some of them can be transitioned to do 40 hours of some other type of work, but others will not be.

Over time what we end up with is a society where some percentage of the population is doing ~40 hours of work per week (and a small few doing even more than that because that's just how they're wired mentally) and the other percentage is doing nothing (or very close to it) because they're incapable of being more productive at some task than a machine.

This is going to be an especially big problem and right now neither of the major parties have a good solution because the political right tends to believe that anyone who can't find work is too lazy and needs to get a job (without recognizing that there are no jobs of which they are capable) and the political left tends to believe that all people are equally capable and that with sufficient training a person who's borderline mentally retarded (or a step above that) can eventually become a neurosurgeon.

Bertrand Russell has a good piece covering this very problem that he wrote almost 100 years ago called In Praise of Idleness. He lays out the argument that if people had more leisure time (as may possible by industrialization) they could devote it to scientific pursuits or towards producing culture. Unfortunately he made the mistake of assuming that everyone was like Bertrand Russell and would kill for extra time to engage in satisfying their own curiosity about the world. In reality a big chunk of those people would just sit on the couch and watch TV with their added time, because they're not mentally capable of advancing our understanding of the universe or creating anything society would deem as artistically worthwhile.

I suppose the good news is that in such a future it becomes reasonably inexpensive to provide for someone who does nothing, because industrialization will drive costs down as production increases. However, the bad news is there isn't a lot of incentive to devote resources to people who can't contribute to society either. Hopefully we take a path that reduces or limits the number of people in that position without inflicting a lot of human suffering to get there. Everything I know about humanity tells me that probably won't be the case.

I'll just leave my usual links here. You've probably seen most of them before

In Praise of Idleness, essay
A town in Canada tried it.
Humans Need Not Apply
Ooh, a new one. Canada is going large-scale now? linky
Sweden is starting to take it seriously as a political issue. linky

It's inevitable less qualified humans will be replaced by machines. It's inevitable over time more qualified humans will be replaced. It's extremely short-sighted (or disingenuous) to blame government regulations for doing something that is inevitably going to happen just a few years down the line anyway. As machines catch up to and surpass humans in more areas the percentage of humans who cannot be profitably employedwill approach unity. In my opinion the reasons to reject these changes tend to be bad ones.

You have the traditionalists, who just don't want anything to change. You have the sour grape connoisseurs, who believe positive change is undesirable because they see it as unlikely. Then there's the worst of them, the people who believe experiencing unpleasantness like working is intrinsically valuable. It's happening. The list of things humans can do that robots and computers cannot do is shrinking... and that list never grows longer. It's time to look to a future free of involuntary employment. It's time to make it happen as soon as possible.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day.

Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before.

But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness.

Can anything more insane be imagined?

The whole essay is well worth reading, and remains just as true as ever it was..

WAT?

Hello random COINTELPRO agent!

I can only explain your troll comment and sockpuppet moderation by you working for the NSA, or by being basically a opinionless hull filled by NSA bullshit.

About Snowden: What wrongdoing? How the *fuck* are you still "ambivalent"? Like this?

Bertrand Russell used almost exactly that same thought experiment in a 1932 article, fwiw:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs

This seems like a rather silly thought experiment. If you start by assuming that everything everyone in the world wants or needs is already plentiful and affordable, then you can reach all kinds of nonsensical conclusions that have nothing to do with reality.

Bertrand Russell used almost exactly that same thought experiment in a 1932 article, fwiw:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Bertrand Russell computed that nobody should work more than 4 hours per day when he wrote In Praise of Idleness. That was over 80 years ago, before computers. Today, there is basically no reason anybody should be working more than a couple hours per week. Except..

We're consuming a fair bit more with two cars instead of one car, longer distance vacations, etc. All that warrants an extra couple hours per week, but it'd never cost more than that.

So where does the money go? You claim some things grow more expensive? Actually no, almost everything has grown massively cheaper, excluding a few commodities and maybe social security. You claim healthcare got more expensive? Again no, healthcare got massively cheaper :
http://truecostofhealthcare.org/video_presentation

You remind me that unnecessary law enforcement caused over 12% of the total increase in federal spending over the last 30 years? Fair enough, but law enforcement has grown massively more efficient too, partially to information technology, but.. We don't even bother holding trials now, if you're accused, you just negotiate your punishment with the prosecutor. If you stand up for your right to a trial, you get locked away for decades.

Really, anything you might mention, I can prove the actual costs declined. Even military costs declined.

So why does stuff still cost so much? It's many reasons, market forces, corruption, graft, exploitation, etc., but the fancy summary word is rent seeking, meaning insiders manipulating the economy to extract non-value added benefits.

Righties blame the government for this. Lefties blame the corporations for this. Both are completely correct, but corruption a fundamental feature of human nature.

We're perfectly able to create a society where almost nobody works more than they want to and everybody works on stuff they consider fun. We choose not do create this society so that rich and powerful people can become more rich and powerful.

"Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order." -- The Abolition Of Work by Bob Black

Additional links here : http://www.metafilter.com/124387/Workers-of-the-world-Relax

There shouldn't *be* one, *in the first place*!

The whole question is, as usually, a deliberate false dichotomy, letting you only pick between two ways of getting raped in the ass. (Just like elections.)

Nuclear weapons should be completely and utterly illegal in every country on the planet. Especially so-called "civilized" ones. End of story.

There should only be *one* large nuke, that automatically gets fired at anyone who finishes to build a nuke. (But that's of course unrealistic, because such a nuke could of course not be under the control of humans, or the whole thing would be futile and get abused in a matter of seconds.)

I can't say it better than this man [Bertrand Russel]:

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

This goes out to both of you idiots:
How about the reason for this being:

- Tax-fuckin-breaks for the rich? (How fucked up is that, in itself??)
- Waging not one, not two, but *three* wars? (And a load of covert trickery.)
- Bailouts for companies that throw the money out of the window, but debts for regular people who do the same.

Ever single one of the above mentioned things ALONE could balance your whole fucking budget right there!
Add them up, and you could live like kings!

It boggles the mind how, again, there are only two sides in your country, acting like they are polar opposites, when in fact they are both on the same extreme side of insanity. How can you all be that ignorant? I know you're not *all* stupid. Come on, smart people in the USA! Man up, kick some asses, and rule this shit again!

on a related topic - maybe the author needs to read Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" and relax a bit: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

We discussed this is the last local political social engineering meeting*, and this is a well-known strategy:

The basic rule of SE is, that your target has to accept your input into its reality. For that, the best way of doing it, is to
00 start at the reality of the target, and then
10 feed the target a small bit. To maximize efficiency, you choose the bit as big as possible, so that it just barely gets accepted, but not rejected. Then
20 let the process of getting used to something do the work for you.
30 IF (NOT reachedTargetReality) THEN GOTO 10

While watching people getting used to it, and more and more arguing whether it was a acceptable idea or... a great idea, ;)
I recommend looking who the driving force behind this is, and to use your force on him.

___
* Yes, those aren't even unofficial anymore, despite probably existing for decades. Also: Yes, I'm pretty new.

PROTIP:
(Learn these by heart.)
1. The foreign terrorists come from the OUTSIDE of your country.
2. They do NOT ever have to land inside your country. (Unless you consider 9/11 a form of "landing".)
3. Hence they do NOT EVER need to see a US airport from the inside.
5. The non-foreign terrorists inside your country don't need to blow up anything, since they already control the population and most of government. (FOX & Co and MSNBC*, "Democrats" and "Republicans" [Both unrelated to the words they call themselves.], etc.)

It boggles the mind how this is not blatantly clear to everyone here...
I honestly can only explain it with this: http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html (Especially the "Discussing two 'sides' that actually are both variants of one side." part.)

___
* From a EU perspective, even MSNBC is still far-right-wing. But thatâ(TM)s not why I listed them. I listed them because they are, although not as crazy as FOX, still a propaganda TV network.

My dad told me he was there shooting his documentary, right at the time Bin Laden house got raided, in the same street, and saw it with his own eyes. He has physical video material and plane tickets etc. to prove it. He even got raided by the government for talking to an ex-agent about it, who was under surveillance.
The US government, who did [1], tells me something different. They got nothing to back it up.
And the conspiracy theorists, who have mental problems [2], tell me something else. They also got nothing.

I haven't seen any of it with my own eyes. (And even those can be deceived.)
So all I can do, is calculate the best hypothesis from how trustworthy things are, and accept that I will probably never know what really happened. (This is what differentiates it from blind belief. I know it's just a theory.)
And who of those above do you think I will trust most?

The "pathology" is called delusional belief and blind trust. Not differentiating between own observations and what somebody just told you he observed. Somebody who is notorious at lying, on top of that.

Birthers & Co. trust the conspiracy theorists blindly. Because it's what they wish were true.
You trust the government blindly. Because you wish that was true.
You both know nothing. Even worse: You actively avoid knowing reality.
You both are idiots because of it.

___
[1] http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html
[2] I researched the psychology behind this. Yes, you can call it that. But that only means those people need someone to help them, accept the real world again. Similar to religious schizophrenia.

What FX? You mean the (yes, well-designed) sets (suits, bridge, space ships), occasional sparks, and Poser default blue aliens? ;)

I found the show to lack a lot in visuals. Always the same boring corridors, rooms, and space shots. With the occasional "planet" mission on what was obviously just a patch of nature behind their sets with a filter over it. ;)
Yet, I forgave them, because I know they had little viewership and probably couldnâ(TM)t afford big-budget stuff.

But the worst, and the core problem, were the stories. Apart from them being utterly boring for the whole first season, stretched out beyond what I could have imagined, they always focused on the US propaganda narrative of "Oh, there are evil terrorists^WCylons^Waliens posing a constant threat via blowing up things and capturing people, so let's rape all moral standards and create a dictatorship!â.
Seriously: They had the head guy strangle and murder someone with his bare hands, and then showed for weeks, how right and good that was. It was disgusting!
And a blindingly obvious analogy.

The problem: If you show that narrative too often, people believe in this reasoning in reality too. And think that's how reality actually is.

Conclusion: http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html

To be honest, after
- seeing with my own eyes, that the "orange revolution" in the Ukraine was 100% fake (both sides were),
- the W.T.F. operation,
- this,
- the CIA being undoubtedly a bleeding-edge social engineering and top-notch intelligence agency,
- and the US setting up pro-US governments at will (that I personally checked, by looking at where those government people came from, and what they did previously, plus myself having some inside information),

I am at a point, where I can believe just as well, that this whole thing is a CIA operation. (Which, in this rare case, I would cheer for.)

Luckily, since I don't believe, but only really trust my own senses (and even those can be misleading), all I know, is that a couple of minutes ago, a text appeared on my screen, that when clicked, displayed some other text (what you'd call TFA).
That's all I can really say.
I might assume I trust my computer (biiiig assumption), and say that a packed containing a request of a page from a server called "Slashdot" from a certain IP, was answered with a packet containing that text.
I might even assume that the whole chain of display, computer, all network nodes to the Slashdot server (or whatever is considered ToriginalFA), the server, all network nodes to the submitter, and the submitter are trustworthy (completely batshit insane assumption) and it actually happened like that, and for that reason too.

But in the end, I know it's all bullshit that I can very likely never prove.
So unless I have some actual proof... I don't give a shit.
Why do you?

Nah. Smells of the CIA spreading another round of disinformation to break them apart, just as they officially announced. (It was even here on Slashdot. Their goal, as they said, is to stir up shit, and start fights between members, while making them look so noncredible, that they break apart.)

I don't trust anything I hear in the "press" about them.
I only trust what I sense with my own senses, or get from people I personally trust on this issue. (And that's pretty much nobody.)

Still trust the press? Or wanna know why you instinctively don't? Read this: http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html

But of course, the cattle gobble it up like it's the hottest shit. Even here on /. How quickly they forget...

No. What's wrong is, that people still believe in voting since they still think they live in a democracy.
Voting only selects, which kind of lobby puppets you take. Since all that ever make it onto a ballot paper, let alone into a government, can only do so, by being paid off (called "election donations") to finance the publicity.
And those are normally people which âoepreviouslyâ worked for that industry. Examples: Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, etc.
Revolving doors to the max, and you don't even need any bribing once in office.

If you really want to change something, learn how to control the minds of the lobbyists (those with money and power regardless of elected government).
Here's a start: http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html

who give life and, in many cases, limb for Haliburton & co.

There. Fixed that for ya.

Oh, and this.

Clearly a wretched hive of scum and villainy... if you're a conservative.

I'm pretty sure they were talking about 1973 when Henry Kissinger won the award. http://www.zpub.com/un/wanted-hkiss.html

"We have a problem in this country (the USA), where HUGE numbers of people are putting in 40-60 hours and not able to get by. I have friends who work that much and still need assistance with their heating bills and food. That's a problem."

Welcome to the club! We have no shirts but our manifesto is this:

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

I would go for economic collapse, thank you. I don't understand all the obsesion with growing, growing and keep growing. From my perspective, we need to focus on happiness over economics. As others point out, we have more than enought production for food and other basic (and not so basic) needs. On this topic, an interesting read: In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell - http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

The problem is that journalism used to be a respected profession, but then some publisher along the way figured "Hey we don't need to report the truth, we only need to report what's 'amazing'", and people bought it.

You wouldn't happen to be talking about this guy, would ya? Or the Big Cheese himself? Heh, Kinda like Nobel and his dynamite...

I would probably happen to be talking about exactly these guys. Many thanks for this!

The problem is that journalism used to be a respected profession, but then some publisher along the way figured "Hey we don't need to report the truth, we only need to report what's 'amazing'", and people bought it.

You wouldn't happen to be talking about this guy, would ya? Or the Big Cheese himself? Heh, Kinda like Nobel and his dynamite...

Pretty much any mainstream economist will tell you that productivity has increased enormously over the past century, due to a combination of factors, technology probably being the biggest. Productivity increases decrease the level of scarcity for any fixed basket of goods to which they apply, because more stuff is produced than previously without an increase in resources.

Of course, you can take that "productivity dividend" in various forms. One way to maintain the illusion of scarcity is to increase your baseline of what you "need", so you always need the things that have just barely become affordable. Then scarcity is definitionally constant, because what you're really doing is holding scarcity fixed and varying your basket of goods accordingly.

The netbook trend shows the opposite way you can take the productivity dividend: hold fixed the things you "need", and enjoy the ever-decreasing scarcity by having to give fewer resources (i.e. hours of work) to get those same goods. Applied to other areas, it's quite possible to reduce the amount of work people have to do on average, as long as you increase the "need" baseline slower than the gains from better productivity decrease scarcity. Typically people haven't done that: do Americans use the productivity increases of the past 50 years to work fewer hours? No, they generally use them to increase material consumption; e.g. the average house size has nearly doubled. But that isn't entirely necessary.

Of course, Bertrand Russell went over all of this in 1932, so it's not particularly novel.

You say school should be like a 9-5 job, but how about turning the problem on its face? End the 40-hour standard work week. Stop drilling into peoples' heads that life is about getting a good job and working at it. Stop teaching depth-first and try breadth. Let parents spend more time with their children, and let children spend more time with their parents, and spend time being alive. Of course, this won't happen any time soon, since our societal overlords dictate that we must keep our economy strong in order to maintain (at the root of it) military superiority.

Bertrand Russell provides a much more elegant discourse than I could hope to: In Praise of Idleness.

because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same

That's probably true, but that doesn't mean you don't have to keep up. That's like saying that there's no point spending money on marketing because your competitors will do the same. There's a name for that type of competition escalation (it's not zero-sum, but it's a similar idea). One side increases a particular outlay to gain an advantage, their competitors do the same, and everyone ends up pretty much where they were before except working harder or spending more. Unfortunately you kind of have to keep playing.

This ties into a little bit of a Bertrand Russell piece I read recently, about how when the means of production go up beyond market demands, say by double, instead of the people employed by that industry working half as hard, half the workforce is laid off and the remainder work just as hard. Well, maybe it doesn't tie that precisely, but it reminds me that no matter how efficient we get, we always end up working just as hard as before.

Cheers.

Bush in part of the reason only because he occupies the Office of the President.

If you think that abuse at the hands of the FBI begins and ends with him, you haven't been paying attention.

I'll respectfully disagree. Most of the Gates Foundation grants are aimed at treating symptoms, not finding solutions to causes. This just continues a vicious cycle of people needing more treatment. With the amount of money at their disposal, they could actually do some serious good for all people by doing something truly humanitarian such as develop cures and place the IP in the public domain.

As for the "donating at least $1.5 billion per year" what else is he going to do with it? Put it under his mattress? He's only "giving away" that portion of his wealth that he couldn't spend if he tried. From I see, he's spending it^H^H giving it away in such a way to "buy" a nice shiny new reputation as a philanthropist. I wouldn't attribute his goal to greed, but more to megalomania at this point. Perhaps he needs to visit Belgium more often.

Henry is responsible for alot of bad things: http://www.zpub.com/un/wanted-hkiss.html

Have a look--it's obvious that this guy's a homicidal manic.

From the main page:

It's an old joke in Silicon Valley. Q: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

Why do microsoft bods keep using the term 'rich' to descibe their technology?

I can think of 50 BILLION reasons why.

If you like In Praise of Idleness, you might like The Abolition of Work by Bob Black.

Nowdays Microsft is in everything from the Xbox to who knows how many software company aquisitions and trying to tie them together in a meaningful manor.

I'm confused.

What does Bill's house have to do with this? I mean, it's a meaningful manor, but it's not like everybody at Microsoft is WORKING there, you know...

Google has many fingers in many pies right now...

I'm not familiar with that euphemism, but I think I see what you're getting at.

Raging alright!
The fucker even rages when he eats (the CFO's) lunch:
http://www.zpub.com/un/larryhotdog.jpg

Yeah, you never know, he be might be attacked by another crazed pie wielding terrorist:

http://www.zpub.com/un/bill/pie.html

Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "In Praise of Idleness" which argues that creative work arises out of constructive idleness. That's why we have academia. ;-)

Full text here:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

You can decide not to pay Tony anything and he'll break your legs (or at least try to). You can decide not to deal with the RIAA (that includes not pirating their music, obviously you can't steal something out of a shop when you decide not to pay for it, either) and the RIAA will ignore you. You don't get their goods, they don't get your goods.

The record companies don't sell goods, they sell rights. Copying something is not stealing.

"The point is, you shouldn't have to, just like you shouldn't have to pay a record company for making a copy of a CD you own"

In most jurisdictions you don't have to pay for that, unless you choose to distribute those copies which means you're competing with the rightsholder using his "reseach".

Well, it really depends on why you're making the copy as to whether or not you have to pay. But fine, let's say copying and distributing those copies. I shouldn't have to pay for that. I shouldn't have to pay for competing with the record companies just like I shouldn't have to pay for competing with Big Tony. Competition is essential in a free market.

It reduces the profitability of making software, likely to the point where paying lots of programmers to write it is no longer feasible.

I fail to see how this is the case.

It'll be mostly down to services then (i.e. you either pay someone because what you want doesn't exist yet or to set it up and maintain it).

In what way is "making software" not a "service"?

Remember, without the GPL there is no reason for anyone to contribute their stuff back into the main codetree

That's absolutely incorrect. There is at least one huge incentive to contribute back to the main codetree, and that is that it facilitates merging of changes made by other people. Maintaining a fork is hard, and it's not going to be done unless there are very good reasons for it. It's much easier to just send the diff to the project maintainers than it is to merge in their diffs every time they make them.

Alternatively, let me put it this way. The GPL doesn't require you to contribute your stuff back to the main codetree either.

it'd be pretty much the way BSD is now

With one major exception, a company couldn't take a piece of software, modify it, and copyright that derivative work. Sure, they wouldn't be required to release the source, but without the ability to sell shrinkwrapped software for more than the cost of the media that's not very useful. The source code clause of the GPL isn't the main thing that distinguishes it from the BSD license, the copyleft is. Things wouldn't be like the BSD licence or the GPL license, they'd be more like the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Or do you want to abolish trade secrets and NDAs as well and nuke the entire research sector?

I'd probably abolish trade secrets but not NDAs. Nuking the entire research sector would be a bad thing.

Also, without pressure from market demands the system wouldn't be very userfriendly (because there's noone paying for the development outside of large companies and those will only do what benefits them).

I don't see why it'd only be large companies, in fact I think small companies probably have more of a demand for software. But even if it is, why do you think that large companies don't demand user friendly products?

To supply a population of X with all the demanded goods, you need

I suggest you read up on Say's Law and the Broken Window Falacy. You might also want to look at In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell.

The error you're making is that you're treating demand as some finite property which can be satisfied. Furthermore, if global demand is satisfied, that means everyone has everything he or she wants. If we all have everything we want, who cares if we're un

William Randolf Hearst, the newspaper dude. See http://www.zpub.com/sf/history/will2.html

You could meet the chairman of Microsoft, but you'll have to profess a passion for Windows first.

How many of us will pretend to love windows just to get a chance to relive some fond memories?

Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby.

So now they have to bribe Windows users for positive reviews, eh? Seems about right.

Broadly though, their percentages are relevant which brings us to...

Next -- do we take dominant to mean most popular?

http://www.zpub.com/un/pope/relig.html [this url is one of their sources, what you didn't check them?] There are 2 billion Christians, but 4 billion non-Christians, does this minority dominate the majority or is it the other way round? [note my crafty rhetorical correctly using the word dominate]

Davinci1980: Christianity isn't even the *dominant* religion on the planet, in terms of number of believers.

You: Yes it is

Me: Christianity is obviously the dominant religion in America (as there are more Christians than not). Christianity is not the dominant religion in China (or India, or Iraq, the locale is irrelevant) as there are more non-Christians than not. If one agrees with these two claims, then Christianity is not the Earth's dominant religion.

You: See all the links at the top of this post, and do your own research. You'll find that it's simply a fact that there are more Christians than any other religion's adherents in the world. However one feels about Christianity, or any other religion, it doesn't change this fact.

AR [animal rights] is a religion, but for the majority of Animal Rights supporters, AR functions as a movement and/or lifestyle choice, not their primary religion.

San Francisco is 46.7 square mile

Yes, a few. :)

Surprisingly, there is an existance proof that Yes, You would.

It's an interesting part of San Francisco history. Some crazy guy in the mid 1800s named Joshua Norton started claiming he was Emperor here; and enough people humored him and his fantasy to the point that people accepted the "currency" the he drew, and were motivated by his decrees. here's his wikipedia article

On the particular part you quoted, check out the writings by John Taylor Gatto (a New York State Teacher of the Year) on all the things schools and prisons share in common, and how much damage conventional age segregated schooling with a fixed curriculum and standardized testing does to developing minds. You can find a book he wrote online here: The Underground History of American Education.

By the way, I agree with you some on the sweeping generalization on feminism (which in some variants is more liberational) but I think his point still stands -- that reconstructing the nature of work is to my (perhaps incomplete) understanding not typically an aspect of mainstream feminism -- especially when that was written (1985?) -- just deciding who does the work or who supervises it or who benefits from it monetarily or otherwise. But as a piece of rhetoric, I still think that paragraph is compelling in showing how people refuse to think systematically about what work needs to be done in society and how best to do it from various points of view.

E.F. Schumacher made similar points in his essay on Buddhist Economics if you want to read an author who is more well known.