WTF? How do you think a business "improves communities"? It does that by creating jobs allowing people who earn nice wages to buy land in a community and spend more in that community than before. Which is what these fools are protesting.
Oh, I get you, you want free stuff. You want business that you have no relationship with to give you free stuff, just because. Sorry, no free stuff for you, you not come back one year.
None of which matters in the long term. Patents just don't last that long. The fad in ridiculous patents for stuff like "exercising a cat with a laser pointer" was around 2000, and most of those patents will expire in the next few years.
Yes, the patent office could do a better job in weeding out the obvious, but the problem is self-correcting. Sorry if not everything happens as internet speed.
The problem with infinite copyrights is the "infinite" part, not the "copyright" part.
As the GP pointed out you are assuming you are one of the best so will get promoted/more money.
No, no I'm not. Because my goal in life isn't "make the most money by any means possible with no moral bounds". There's too much of that in the world as it is.
My goal is to be paid the market rate for my work, which if that isn't enough then it's because what I can do isn't very valuable, and I should learn to do something new. And as a software developer, that's a process we have to go through every few years to stay current, so I'm not speaking hypothetically.
No, we know what unions actually look like in the real world, and it's different from what they look like in your head. The compensation of airline pilots is a good example: the top few % make really good money, but typical starting pay is around $20k, and the average pay really isn't that good for such a technical specialty. Union and non-union auto workers take home about the same pay on average. And unions are utterly crushing to the spirits of those of us who want pay to reflect merit! There's no significant advantage to be had that compensates for that terrible downside.
The comment was perfectly on-topic if you understood it. It summarizes the main theme of a trilogy of books: the human mind is better at spotting patterns than the universe is at creating them. So if something seems like an unlikely coincidence, the best assumption is that it is an unlikely coincidence, unless you can hypothesize a reasonable mechanism to explain the connection (and then make successful predictions using that).
You make an important correction, but what is a sales tax if not a property tax collected at the time of sale? It's a percentage of the value of property, for goodness sake. Not that it matters with the current SCOTUS of course.
However, it will certainly delay the seemingly-inevitable taxation of 401ks when the government finally hits bottom (which IMO is at least 10 years off, inevitable but not immediate) while they work our some spin as to why it's not a direct tax - maybe Roberts can rule that it's a fine!
Especially since everything tech-specific you know will be obsolete in 5 years. You want to develop expertise in the next big thing beforebig companies jump on the bandwagon. Frankly I have a lot less enthusiasm for the next tech stack these days, knowing it will be gone in few short years, but I still have a home VM setup because, like it or not, you have to keep up or become one of those unemployed tech guys complaining there are no jobs any more.
Unions funnel all the money to the most senior 1% of employees, and pay is not related to merit at all. Fuck that.
I'm an adult, perfectly capable of being responsible for my own career. I've made mistakes, and I've made good moves, and I've gotten lucky, and I've gotten "OMG get me out of here". That's life in the real world. But I kept my tech skills current, and my non-tech skills growing, and I now I make many times what my first job paid.
But then, I'm good at what I do. If I were in the bottom 20%, you bet I'd be all in favor of a system that ignores merit for seniority.
Again, that's just wrong. A bank with $1,000 in deposits via a CD can loan out precisely $1,000. There are no reserve requirements on CDs. There is also no borrowing of additional funds from the Fed (in the normal course of business for a healthy bank, although the "overnight window" is there for panics).
In fact, the Fed money loaning is the opposite of what you've stated. Banks voluntarily deposit money with the Fed in excess of reserves to get a decent interest rate, and currently there are $1.7 T in excess reserves - an insane amount, and no one really knows what effect it's having on the economy.
The ratio you talk about is not a bank with $1,000 somehow able to loan out $10,000. It's the net effect of the fractional reserve banking system on the money supply.
The US federal government is constitutionally restricted from anything that can't be interpreted as an income tax (so my VAT suggestion fails as well). The US constitution is fairly short, but mentions twice that any taxes collected by the federal government must be given to the states (proportion to population). Income taxes are specifically exempted from that requirement by the 16th amendment, but it remains for any other tax.
Imagine ministries, where the ministers and staff design new laws rather than "Advisers" being officially employed e.g. by the pharma industry...
We try to do that here in the US, but it doesn't work. On average, a congressional staffer gets 15x as much pay when he moves to his job in industry. You don't need to be officially employed a company while working as an advisor in order to be working on behalf of a company.
Just to show this isn't about liberal rantings: you can finance the government perfectly well without the government ever knowing how much any specific individual makes.
Replace income tax with payroll tax, replace cap gains and dividends taxes with a tax on gains within a company (corporation or otherwise). Heck, you could probably combine the two in some clever way by taxing gross earnings. Plus there's always the VAT.
It's hard to be a business in secret, and from a fund-raising perspective if 1% of your economy manages to hide in some dark corner, that's only 1% less tax revenue and you still have a workable system. Honest businesses small and large are used to hiring an accountant and dealing with paying taxes as needed.
Sure, there might be all sorts of downsides to such a system, but my point is: you could certainly fund the government even with an untraceable currency (which bitcoin isn't, to begin with).
While I love Stross's fiction, he's a bit of a nutjob when it comes to real world issues (maybe that goes hand and hand with good SF).
You're trying to extrapolate from current personal circumstances to the macroeconomy quite different from our own. Step back a minute. At large scale, what's important is how much goods and services get produced, and whether anything interferes with their distribution. While money is the current incentive to work, the point of work is to produce those goods and services wanted or needed by others.
Most of the good and services people produced 200 years ago are now largely automated, with a quite small percentage of the population still involved in those areas. Since we weren't content with the standard of living from 200 years ago, we now consume vastly more, and most people are now employed providing goods and services that either didn't exist, or were out of reach of the common man, in the early 19th century. Heck, the stuff that the common man consumed even 100 years ago is mostly provided by automation now.
We will always seek to improve our standard of living, and so we continue the pattern. Today it's quite common for a middle class family to have a maid and a gardener, for example, but I expect services to become more "peer to peer", for example we collectively spend much more time in salons and spas now, and the social class gap there is vanishing, services like Lyft are chaging the way people think about having a driver, personal consulting services are on the rise, and the notion that "you hire people of lower social class to work for you" is mostly gone where those services don't involve manual labor.
On the subject of work, you seem to be conflating "boring drudge job that I hate every minute of" with "work". Sorry if that's how your life is right now, but boring drudge jobs are precisely what automation replaces. Think instead of jobs where you're an expert in something that many people interact with daily, and it's interesting to you but tedious to others. For example: interior decorating, home theater installation, wardrobe consulting, driving, tuning cars for performance, laying out the storage in a closet perfectly to organize everything, planning weddings, and on and on.
There are a great many such services, which today are mostly consumed only by those with a lot of income and little time, which will gradually move to far larger pools of consumers as the labor involved in boring drudge automatable jobs vanishes.
You've clearly never driven on California's roads (unlighted freeways with big potholes through major urban centers - really California?). Plus I suspect the Tesla plant mostly uses the rail line it backs up against.
Anyhow, the portion of taxes that goes to roads and police and such is a tiny fraction that no one feels bad about paying. At the federal government level its about 14% of spending, and it's similarly low at the local level. Alameda county, where the Tesla plant is, needs to spend roughly 100% of it's tax revenue on funding pensions, and borrows additional money for it's alleged road spending. The City of Fremont finally saw the light (literally) about a year ago and scaled back pensions so that they could actually budget a few bucks to keep the street lights on.
tl;dr: the roads and police are not a significant government expense.
The effect is the same whether it's one bank acting alone or many banks acting in concert. One dollar deposited at one bank leads to a series of loans and further deposits which eventually permit 1000 banks to make 1000 $1 loans and, all together, collect $10 worth of interest. Provided, of course, that no two individuals ever ask to withdraw "their" dollars at the same time and thus bring the whole house of cards crashing down.
Out of curiosity, do the banks really need to be different, or does money deposited by a bank's loan customer count toward that bank's deposits? It was my impression that all deposits counted and there was no need for the money to pass through many distinct banks.
Well, there's not much fear of a run on the banks since the FDIC was created and backed with the money-printing power of the Fed just to prevent that - I can't think of a reason I would ever withdraw my saving as physical cash. I might spend all my savings to buy gold or land or guns, but I've never heard of even the "preppers" hoarding cash.
No, it doesn't strictly have to be a different back, it's just quite likely to be. My only point was you can only loan out the total of your deposits so it's not "free money": you have to work to convince people to deposit that money in the first place, and you won't do that without offering something of value.
would prefer a clear dividing line between demand accounts, which the bank must be prepared to pay out in full at any time (full reserves), and time accounts, which should be clearly described as investments, loans to the bank which, like any loan, may not be available for withdrawal on demand and could end in default, costing you some or all of your principle. Current practice is to mix the two types in varying proportions, from interest-bearing checking accounts to CDs guaranteed against default.
The is a clear dividing line, it's just not the one you want. A "demand account" is for all consumer purchases the same as a "checking account" - allowing banks to pay interest on those started around 2000, but the interest has no bearing on it. (And the reserve requirements are pretty low for demand accounts too, their just not 0 like savings and CDs).
It's worth noting that in the current system, there's not really a risk that you can't get your money back because of fractional reserve banking, because a bank can meet withdrawal needs short-term by just borrowing the money from the Fed, which is willing to create infinite money to meet such demand. There's not enough physical currency to go around, but again I'm not sure that's relevant any more.
No, you're just not getting how it works. The same bank does not get to lend out the same money twice. The "same money" gets loaned out multiple times (and thus the money supply is quite a bit larger than the physical currency pool) by different banks in sequence. The Fed is very firm about this: it's the only bank that gets to actually print money, all the other banks must get a deposit before they loan the money out.
Currently Slashdot is displaying ads for me along with the "disable ads" checkbox checked. Perhaps "approximate computing" is farther along than I imagined!
have no problem with "work of the mind"â"I'm a software developer too, BTW. But when you can take $1 in reserves (just enough to meet the daily demand for physical currency) and turn it into a $1000 loan, and get paid real interest on the full $1000, there's something undeniably fishy going on.
You may be misunderstanding how this works. A given bank can't lend out the same money twice, or 1000 times. In order to lend out $1000 someone has to deposit $1000 with the bank (after which that money is presumably spent and if another bank must convince the new owner of that $1000 to deposit it, only then is it loaned out again). And the bank needs to do something people find valuable in order for people to make those deposits, and accept a lower interest rate than the bank can make. in return.
Historically, being a retail storefront at all was a big part of how banks added value, and being able to process small transitions with good liquidity was the rest. But all of those things are becoming available to the individual small investor now with no need for a bank. Banks are basically coasting now on the financial sophistication of the average guy catching up with technological advancement (which usually take a generation or so).
How can we ever run out of time to take in personal services? An economy where each of us spend half our time providing personal services and half consuming personal services (from one other person at a time) is quite viable (if robots are doing the rest) and we're quite a ways down that path already today.
It's well understood that people don't much value things given to them, compared to how they value things they earned. I'm not sure why you'd question that.
If we're talking experiments, learn the secret of NIMH: unlimited free resources in constrained geography leads to a population spike followed by a loss of the social ability to reproduce, and then extinction. It's hard to argue that this just applies to mice when we see it around us, in demographic implosions in well-off high-population areas. Universe 25 is terrifying once you understand it.
Our mental wellbeing requires real challenges to measure ourselves against and lend a sense of purpose to life. Historically we can usually often societies into farmers and bandits, makers and takers, but the bandits often had a harsher, more challenging life than the farmers, so everyone still had adversity to overcome. When the "bandits" instead just vote themselves lives of ease on the backs of the "farmers" (to stretch the metaphor a bit), social structures seem to fall apart within those groups and you get the same "random waves of violence" seen in Universe 25.
The difference between a bank and a "random guy on the net" is that the bank can loan out money at no cost to themselves, apart from the low reserve requirements, while the guy on the net has to actually earn every single dollar he loans out.
There are no reserve requirements any more, except on "demand" (checking) accounts. But that bank earns its money as much as the "guy on the net" does. As a software developer, I'm going to insist that work of the mind is just as much "earning" as work of the body.
Banks may not have a monopoly on dollars, but they do have a monopoly on cheap dollars that effectively prevents anyone else from competing in their domain.
No, they convince people to lend them money. At the rates most banks pay for savings, I'm amazed and impressed they convince anyone to do that. But there's also peer-to-peer lending, charitable micro-loans, and other models for lending. Most people go to a bank because banks are traditionally pretty good at being retail storefronts. But the value of brick-and-mortar storefronts keeps falling in all businesses, and banks don't have a lock-in this century.
No, there certainly isn't a "major shortage" by historical norms, just a stretch of unemployment that's "bad" by modern standards. But recovery is here, at least where I am - help wanted signs are everywhere again for low-skill jobs.
We've been replacing intelligence as well, for centuries. A significant portion of the workforce spent their days writing stuff down, and adding stuff up, and those jobs have slowly vanished over the past century.
Demand likely does stretch to infinity - why wouldn't we want more? Whatever the robots do, there will always be personal services we want from one another. Paying people to do nothing, OTOH, could bring down society if the past is any guide - when people don't have a stake in building things, they tend to spend their time destroying them.
How would that work, exactly? "Ultra-luxury" doesn't involve having that much more stuff than anyone else these days, rather it's about having stuff that takes more human labor to produce, unlike that vulgar mass-produced stuff. Pretty much the opposite of what you fear, in fact.
Anyhow, all corporate earnings combined are less than 10% of total salaries. It really doesn't matter much in the scheme of things where that 10% goes - we keep creating new jobs because the average man keeps wanting more. Sure you could have some if you only had what robots made, but you could have more if you had some services humans provided. And as a species, we always want more.
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WTF? How do you think a business "improves communities"? It does that by creating jobs allowing people who earn nice wages to buy land in a community and spend more in that community than before. Which is what these fools are protesting.
Oh, I get you, you want free stuff. You want business that you have no relationship with to give you free stuff, just because. Sorry, no free stuff for you, you not come back one year.
WTF are you going on about?
None of which matters in the long term. Patents just don't last that long. The fad in ridiculous patents for stuff like "exercising a cat with a laser pointer" was around 2000, and most of those patents will expire in the next few years.
Yes, the patent office could do a better job in weeding out the obvious, but the problem is self-correcting. Sorry if not everything happens as internet speed.
The problem with infinite copyrights is the "infinite" part, not the "copyright" part.
As the GP pointed out you are assuming you are one of the best so will get promoted/more money.
No, no I'm not. Because my goal in life isn't "make the most money by any means possible with no moral bounds". There's too much of that in the world as it is.
My goal is to be paid the market rate for my work, which if that isn't enough then it's because what I can do isn't very valuable, and I should learn to do something new. And as a software developer, that's a process we have to go through every few years to stay current, so I'm not speaking hypothetically.
No, we know what unions actually look like in the real world, and it's different from what they look like in your head. The compensation of airline pilots is a good example: the top few % make really good money, but typical starting pay is around $20k, and the average pay really isn't that good for such a technical specialty. Union and non-union auto workers take home about the same pay on average. And unions are utterly crushing to the spirits of those of us who want pay to reflect merit! There's no significant advantage to be had that compensates for that terrible downside.
The comment was perfectly on-topic if you understood it. It summarizes the main theme of a trilogy of books: the human mind is better at spotting patterns than the universe is at creating them. So if something seems like an unlikely coincidence, the best assumption is that it is an unlikely coincidence, unless you can hypothesize a reasonable mechanism to explain the connection (and then make successful predictions using that).
You make an important correction, but what is a sales tax if not a property tax collected at the time of sale? It's a percentage of the value of property, for goodness sake. Not that it matters with the current SCOTUS of course.
However, it will certainly delay the seemingly-inevitable taxation of 401ks when the government finally hits bottom (which IMO is at least 10 years off, inevitable but not immediate) while they work our some spin as to why it's not a direct tax - maybe Roberts can rule that it's a fine!
Especially since everything tech-specific you know will be obsolete in 5 years. You want to develop expertise in the next big thing beforebig companies jump on the bandwagon. Frankly I have a lot less enthusiasm for the next tech stack these days, knowing it will be gone in few short years, but I still have a home VM setup because, like it or not, you have to keep up or become one of those unemployed tech guys complaining there are no jobs any more.
Unions funnel all the money to the most senior 1% of employees, and pay is not related to merit at all. Fuck that.
I'm an adult, perfectly capable of being responsible for my own career. I've made mistakes, and I've made good moves, and I've gotten lucky, and I've gotten "OMG get me out of here". That's life in the real world. But I kept my tech skills current, and my non-tech skills growing, and I now I make many times what my first job paid.
But then, I'm good at what I do. If I were in the bottom 20%, you bet I'd be all in favor of a system that ignores merit for seniority.
Again, that's just wrong. A bank with $1,000 in deposits via a CD can loan out precisely $1,000. There are no reserve requirements on CDs. There is also no borrowing of additional funds from the Fed (in the normal course of business for a healthy bank, although the "overnight window" is there for panics).
In fact, the Fed money loaning is the opposite of what you've stated. Banks voluntarily deposit money with the Fed in excess of reserves to get a decent interest rate, and currently there are $1.7 T in excess reserves - an insane amount, and no one really knows what effect it's having on the economy.
The ratio you talk about is not a bank with $1,000 somehow able to loan out $10,000. It's the net effect of the fractional reserve banking system on the money supply.
The US federal government is constitutionally restricted from anything that can't be interpreted as an income tax (so my VAT suggestion fails as well). The US constitution is fairly short, but mentions twice that any taxes collected by the federal government must be given to the states (proportion to population). Income taxes are specifically exempted from that requirement by the 16th amendment, but it remains for any other tax.
Imagine ministries, where the ministers and staff design new laws rather than "Advisers" being officially employed e.g. by the pharma industry...
We try to do that here in the US, but it doesn't work. On average, a congressional staffer gets 15x as much pay when he moves to his job in industry. You don't need to be officially employed a company while working as an advisor in order to be working on behalf of a company.
Just to show this isn't about liberal rantings: you can finance the government perfectly well without the government ever knowing how much any specific individual makes.
Replace income tax with payroll tax, replace cap gains and dividends taxes with a tax on gains within a company (corporation or otherwise). Heck, you could probably combine the two in some clever way by taxing gross earnings. Plus there's always the VAT.
It's hard to be a business in secret, and from a fund-raising perspective if 1% of your economy manages to hide in some dark corner, that's only 1% less tax revenue and you still have a workable system. Honest businesses small and large are used to hiring an accountant and dealing with paying taxes as needed.
Sure, there might be all sorts of downsides to such a system, but my point is: you could certainly fund the government even with an untraceable currency (which bitcoin isn't, to begin with).
While I love Stross's fiction, he's a bit of a nutjob when it comes to real world issues (maybe that goes hand and hand with good SF).
You're trying to extrapolate from current personal circumstances to the macroeconomy quite different from our own. Step back a minute. At large scale, what's important is how much goods and services get produced, and whether anything interferes with their distribution. While money is the current incentive to work, the point of work is to produce those goods and services wanted or needed by others.
Most of the good and services people produced 200 years ago are now largely automated, with a quite small percentage of the population still involved in those areas. Since we weren't content with the standard of living from 200 years ago, we now consume vastly more, and most people are now employed providing goods and services that either didn't exist, or were out of reach of the common man, in the early 19th century. Heck, the stuff that the common man consumed even 100 years ago is mostly provided by automation now.
We will always seek to improve our standard of living, and so we continue the pattern. Today it's quite common for a middle class family to have a maid and a gardener, for example, but I expect services to become more "peer to peer", for example we collectively spend much more time in salons and spas now, and the social class gap there is vanishing, services like Lyft are chaging the way people think about having a driver, personal consulting services are on the rise, and the notion that "you hire people of lower social class to work for you" is mostly gone where those services don't involve manual labor.
On the subject of work, you seem to be conflating "boring drudge job that I hate every minute of" with "work". Sorry if that's how your life is right now, but boring drudge jobs are precisely what automation replaces. Think instead of jobs where you're an expert in something that many people interact with daily, and it's interesting to you but tedious to others. For example: interior decorating, home theater installation, wardrobe consulting, driving, tuning cars for performance, laying out the storage in a closet perfectly to organize everything, planning weddings, and on and on.
There are a great many such services, which today are mostly consumed only by those with a lot of income and little time, which will gradually move to far larger pools of consumers as the labor involved in boring drudge automatable jobs vanishes.
Tesla's market cap is 25% of Ford's. I really wish them the best, but the stock already prices in insane growth from where they are now.
You've clearly never driven on California's roads (unlighted freeways with big potholes through major urban centers - really California?). Plus I suspect the Tesla plant mostly uses the rail line it backs up against.
Anyhow, the portion of taxes that goes to roads and police and such is a tiny fraction that no one feels bad about paying. At the federal government level its about 14% of spending, and it's similarly low at the local level. Alameda county, where the Tesla plant is, needs to spend roughly 100% of it's tax revenue on funding pensions, and borrows additional money for it's alleged road spending. The City of Fremont finally saw the light (literally) about a year ago and scaled back pensions so that they could actually budget a few bucks to keep the street lights on.
tl;dr: the roads and police are not a significant government expense.
The effect is the same whether it's one bank acting alone or many banks acting in concert. One dollar deposited at one bank leads to a series of loans and further deposits which eventually permit 1000 banks to make 1000 $1 loans and, all together, collect $10 worth of interest. Provided, of course, that no two individuals ever ask to withdraw "their" dollars at the same time and thus bring the whole house of cards crashing down.
Out of curiosity, do the banks really need to be different, or does money deposited by a bank's loan customer count toward that bank's deposits? It was my impression that all deposits counted and there was no need for the money to pass through many distinct banks.
Well, there's not much fear of a run on the banks since the FDIC was created and backed with the money-printing power of the Fed just to prevent that - I can't think of a reason I would ever withdraw my saving as physical cash. I might spend all my savings to buy gold or land or guns, but I've never heard of even the "preppers" hoarding cash.
No, it doesn't strictly have to be a different back, it's just quite likely to be. My only point was you can only loan out the total of your deposits so it's not "free money": you have to work to convince people to deposit that money in the first place, and you won't do that without offering something of value.
would prefer a clear dividing line between demand accounts, which the bank must be prepared to pay out in full at any time (full reserves), and time accounts, which should be clearly described as investments, loans to the bank which, like any loan, may not be available for withdrawal on demand and could end in default, costing you some or all of your principle. Current practice is to mix the two types in varying proportions, from interest-bearing checking accounts to CDs guaranteed against default.
The is a clear dividing line, it's just not the one you want. A "demand account" is for all consumer purchases the same as a "checking account" - allowing banks to pay interest on those started around 2000, but the interest has no bearing on it. (And the reserve requirements are pretty low for demand accounts too, their just not 0 like savings and CDs).
It's worth noting that in the current system, there's not really a risk that you can't get your money back because of fractional reserve banking, because a bank can meet withdrawal needs short-term by just borrowing the money from the Fed, which is willing to create infinite money to meet such demand. There's not enough physical currency to go around, but again I'm not sure that's relevant any more.
No, you're just not getting how it works. The same bank does not get to lend out the same money twice. The "same money" gets loaned out multiple times (and thus the money supply is quite a bit larger than the physical currency pool) by different banks in sequence. The Fed is very firm about this: it's the only bank that gets to actually print money, all the other banks must get a deposit before they loan the money out.
Currently Slashdot is displaying ads for me along with the "disable ads" checkbox checked. Perhaps "approximate computing" is farther along than I imagined!
have no problem with "work of the mind"â"I'm a software developer too, BTW. But when you can take $1 in reserves (just enough to meet the daily demand for physical currency) and turn it into a $1000 loan, and get paid real interest on the full $1000, there's something undeniably fishy going on.
You may be misunderstanding how this works. A given bank can't lend out the same money twice, or 1000 times. In order to lend out $1000 someone has to deposit $1000 with the bank (after which that money is presumably spent and if another bank must convince the new owner of that $1000 to deposit it, only then is it loaned out again). And the bank needs to do something people find valuable in order for people to make those deposits, and accept a lower interest rate than the bank can make. in return.
Historically, being a retail storefront at all was a big part of how banks added value, and being able to process small transitions with good liquidity was the rest. But all of those things are becoming available to the individual small investor now with no need for a bank. Banks are basically coasting now on the financial sophistication of the average guy catching up with technological advancement (which usually take a generation or so).
How can we ever run out of time to take in personal services? An economy where each of us spend half our time providing personal services and half consuming personal services (from one other person at a time) is quite viable (if robots are doing the rest) and we're quite a ways down that path already today.
It's well understood that people don't much value things given to them, compared to how they value things they earned. I'm not sure why you'd question that.
If we're talking experiments, learn the secret of NIMH: unlimited free resources in constrained geography leads to a population spike followed by a loss of the social ability to reproduce, and then extinction. It's hard to argue that this just applies to mice when we see it around us, in demographic implosions in well-off high-population areas. Universe 25 is terrifying once you understand it.
Our mental wellbeing requires real challenges to measure ourselves against and lend a sense of purpose to life. Historically we can usually often societies into farmers and bandits, makers and takers, but the bandits often had a harsher, more challenging life than the farmers, so everyone still had adversity to overcome. When the "bandits" instead just vote themselves lives of ease on the backs of the "farmers" (to stretch the metaphor a bit), social structures seem to fall apart within those groups and you get the same "random waves of violence" seen in Universe 25.
The difference between a bank and a "random guy on the net" is that the bank can loan out money at no cost to themselves, apart from the low reserve requirements, while the guy on the net has to actually earn every single dollar he loans out.
There are no reserve requirements any more, except on "demand" (checking) accounts. But that bank earns its money as much as the "guy on the net" does. As a software developer, I'm going to insist that work of the mind is just as much "earning" as work of the body.
Banks may not have a monopoly on dollars, but they do have a monopoly on cheap dollars that effectively prevents anyone else from competing in their domain.
No, they convince people to lend them money. At the rates most banks pay for savings, I'm amazed and impressed they convince anyone to do that. But there's also peer-to-peer lending, charitable micro-loans, and other models for lending. Most people go to a bank because banks are traditionally pretty good at being retail storefronts. But the value of brick-and-mortar storefronts keeps falling in all businesses, and banks don't have a lock-in this century.
No, there certainly isn't a "major shortage" by historical norms, just a stretch of unemployment that's "bad" by modern standards. But recovery is here, at least where I am - help wanted signs are everywhere again for low-skill jobs.
We've been replacing intelligence as well, for centuries. A significant portion of the workforce spent their days writing stuff down, and adding stuff up, and those jobs have slowly vanished over the past century.
Demand likely does stretch to infinity - why wouldn't we want more? Whatever the robots do, there will always be personal services we want from one another. Paying people to do nothing, OTOH, could bring down society if the past is any guide - when people don't have a stake in building things, they tend to spend their time destroying them.
How would that work, exactly? "Ultra-luxury" doesn't involve having that much more stuff than anyone else these days, rather it's about having stuff that takes more human labor to produce, unlike that vulgar mass-produced stuff. Pretty much the opposite of what you fear, in fact.
Anyhow, all corporate earnings combined are less than 10% of total salaries. It really doesn't matter much in the scheme of things where that 10% goes - we keep creating new jobs because the average man keeps wanting more. Sure you could have some if you only had what robots made, but you could have more if you had some services humans provided. And as a species, we always want more.