I really liked my last snarky response, but I just thought of another one:
Those in-app purchases require an account password - that's a parental responsibility. Allowing the kids to know the password is no different than sending them to the toy store with a blank check. Not only are the parents not teaching their children to take responsibility for their actions, the parents themselves aren't being responsible.
I've long been thinking the same thing about crosswalk signals. Children whose parents fail to teach them to look at the vehicular traffic signals to know when it is safe to cross are not giving their children an important life skill. Spending taxpayer money on crosswalk signals, just to protect the children of a few incompetent parents, is grossly wasteful nanny-stateism. If we don't allow natural car-versus-pedestrian fatalities to punish stupid parents by killing their children, how will they ever learn?
If they can do that, those children have much larger issues than a $4 charge - they have stupid and irresponsible parents, who are not only providing inadequate supervision, but are incompetent at teaching their children life skills.
Your observation, whether true or not, does not make the transactions efficient. Inefficient transactions are bad for the economy, regardless of their cause. Do you want American companies to lose money? Do you hate America?
>> Because its their job to hate people who take advantage of others in matters of trade?
> Very true. A wholly free market is actually quite toxic, as a certain Adam Smith noted. Especially when it's dishonest.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes! Exactly this.
the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many users as possible."
Because that is what we pay them to do. And there is a very good reason; because private firms measure customer satisfaction through the lens of maximization of profit (fairly short run profit in the case of apps), and the FTC measures it through imperfect objective analysis of the rational self-interest and informedness of the transaction participants. Gee, here's a surprise: Those two measures don't always agree, and sometimes, when they are far enough out of whack, it actually increases GDP in the long run if you limit the freedom of people to engage in inefficienty transactions.
A really good example of such potentially inefficient transactions is children, who do not understand how much time and effort it costs to acquire money, are in the throes of video game passion and a screen pops up saying, "Win More, Only $3.99! Buy Now!"
Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented...
A market filled with efficient transactions increases GDP in the long run relative to a market with less efficient transactions. So, tell me, Joshua Wright; do you hate the economy? Do you want a lower GDP? Do you want our corporations to lose money? Do want our wealthiest stockholders to have to buy slightly smaller Gulfstreams? Answer me, Mr. Wright: Do you hate America?
So Cabinet-level officials such as the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence have committed perjury during Congressional testimony or been held in Contempt of Congress before?
No, they haven't - every other time officials of that level have been about to be held in Contempt of Congress, the official caved and supplied Congress with what was being asked.
Neither side wants this to go to court, and both sides know it. The AARC wants a settlement they can point to for high pressure settlement letters to other defendants, and the car companies want a non-revokable license for these devices. I'd give it a 90%+ confidence that this will result in an undisclosed settlement within a year, and while we won't know the number they settle for, I'm guessing it won't be enough to make a blip on the car companies' quarterly reports.
I think so, if you have user-grade service, but I pay for a commercial-grade Internet connection that comes with a static IP for running services, and I run three hosted servers. Freedom isn't free (but it is a lot of fun).:)
Ever wonder if maybe that rule has less to do with bandwidth and more to do with preventing the creation of a peer-to-peer, decentralized internet?
I think there's some truth to that, if for no other reason than that the ISP probably would rather not have the headache associated with average idiots running servers. They're run by guys with MBAs who genuinely believe that centralized is inherently better -- like to the level that they don't even grasp what you're saying at first, if you try to explain the benefits of decentralized.
Anyone have other theories why this number is so much higher than the 5% of people who are just "late"?
The first window lasts from 0.08 years to 0.5 years, while the second window lasts from 0.5 years to 7.0 years. The relative window width is (7.0 - 0.5) / (0.5 - 0.08) = 6.5 / 0.42 = 15.47. So if each person only had zero or one debts, and no debt was ever paid off, you'd expect there to be 15.47 times as many debt holders in the second window as in the first. 15.47 * 5% = 77%. So the fact that it is at 35% means that there is some combination of people being in both categories and people paying off their debt while it is "In Collections." If it was 5%, or 77%, you'd be able to make a pretty solid guess that something was hinky, but 35% is in the "could be perfectly reasonable" range.
I'll also echo the sentiment that some creditors do a horrible job of billing. I had a large outstanding debt for years before finding it on my credit report. The company had a typo in my address from the original signup, but had been getting copies of my credit report which had my correct address. They sent all the bills to the incorrect address they had on file, never once contacted me at the address on file with the credit reporting company they had been contacting.
I can't find words for how much I hate Congress and the President for this.
I can. But I'm afraid that if I use them in public, I could be put on the secret watch list and have to face extra scrutiny in every LEO encounter when "possible terrorist, report to FBI" pops up on their computer.
Of course, that chilling effect means that the peaceful feedback mechanism that is supposed to moderate government overreach is being attenuated. When that moderation system is weakened, excesses grow. Fortunately, as The Declaration of Independence notes, "accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." So we have time.
But time grows short; The Declaration does not end with that phrase.
Very true, that is the only real solution to this problem. Whether corporations, governments, or criminals, the value in surveillance is too great to be resisted. The only solution is increasing the cost and detecting it when it happens. Decentralization will both make it more expensive to do generalized surveillance, and make it harder to do it without getting caught.
and nothing seems to be in works...
Not as true.
OwnCloud lets you host your own dropbox, mobile-to-desktop sync, etc. MediaGoblin lets you host your own replacement for YouTube. Asterisk lets you host an end-to-end encrypted replacement for Skype. Tor and I2P let you slip past your ISP's surveillance net.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more at Stop-Prism.org.
Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.
Can you quote me the part where I was being hypocritical? Can you show me where I said that I supported our funding of Egypt or Saudi Arabia? Or are you just trying to falsely discredit me because you don't like my opinion?
Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.
Not for me. For me, the problem is that my government arms Israel. I accept that many nations handle their regional bood-debt feuds with more bloodshed. It's stupid and self-propagating, but fine, go ahead, if that's your thing. But if you blow my paycheck on your cock-waving bullets, you become subject to my judgment of your actions.
Here's my latest Snowden / Binney 2016 bumper sticker art, suitable for printing at 2.75" x 5" cropped size plus a.125" bleed, 300 DPI, on vinyl: PNG Vector (LibreOffice Draw)
This is my original artwork, CC BY-NC-SA, so print a pile and spread them around if you like. I use psprint.com, and I recommend searching "vinyl bumper stickers" on DuckDuckGo, where psprint is usually running a coupon in the search results. I haven't received the color proofs for this version yet, but these are corrected from a previous batch and should be pretty good.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo or PSPrint, and Snowden/Binney is (perhaps unfortunately) neither a real nor a realistic campaign. This is just for giggles.
When travelling from the UK to Chile... Flying is pretty much the only sensible option for me right now. I pretty much hate the entire experience but there are not better alternatives for when you NEED to travel to some places.
When travelling in and around the UK I would never fly if I can avoid it as the entire experience has become pretty inconvenient.
Excellent -- it sounds like you are making all reasonable efforts to cut their cashflow.
>> There's also question of motivation. Why would soldiers waste expensive missiles for some irrelevant passenger plane?
> To shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft. They had already shot down a Ukrainian transport plane and a Ukrainian fighter within the previous week. They were on a roll.
That's the same point looneycyborg was attempting to make; that it was not terrorism because it was not an attempt to target civilians.
Though I agree with your accurate and informative correction regarding the civilian flight route issue.
Bob9113 here. Don't tell my potential customers what I can and can't supply. You don't know my inventory, nor my procurement abilities. Though you are right that the price would be substantially above $50,000.
"Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."
Remember those stickers on the registers at K-Mart, facing the cashier, with the letters, "TYFSOK"? It stands for, "Thank You For Shopping Our K-Mart." The sticker was to remind the beleagured minimum wage employee to recite the words. Did anyone, ever, feel that the person mechanically parroting that catch phrase actually cared? How about the greeters at Wal Mart? (I think they've pretty much gone away, like the TYFSOK stickers)
You can teach an automaton to mimick human emotion, but even when it is an actual human such mimickry is patronizing and irritating. If you want human warmth, hire warm humans (downside; warm humans who can keep their positive mental attitude while working at an airport are expensive and they need time to recover from their shifts).
If you are going to use computers, embrace their natural advantages. Computers are fast, predictable, and emotionless. Those can be good characteristics in a user interface -- particularly when the customer just wants to get the process finished and move on. Work with the entire industry to develop a standard interface and sequence so the user and bang through it without even engaging their brain -- everyone is better off with travellers on autopilot. Painting a computer in whore's makeup won't make it a lover for any but the most desperate.
And, for you air travellers, a quick question: Why are you still endorsing them? Why are you still agreeing to be subjected to the TSA and the awful customer service of the airlines? Have you really made all reasonable efforts to switch to alternatives? If you aren't making significant personal sacrifices to cut their cashflow, you are lending aid and comfort to the enemy. I've driven 6,000 miles in the past year avoiding air travel. What are you doing?
While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release.
"But Teacher! Billy is punching people, so why can't I punch people?!?"
If you have empirical data to present on the risk of the current levels of radiation exposure measured in QALYs, and an argument for adjusting the current regulated level, present it. But saying that we should ease our regulation on this form of harm, merely because you assert that another form of harm is insufficiently regulated, is manipulative and irrational.
But the philosophical core of the region and the tech industry remains fundamentally progressive.
Never underestimate the power of a god. And make no mistake about it; to many in The Valley, Zuck is a god. Even among those for whom he is not, most worship at the temple of Facebook with more dedication, trust, and fervor than the average Christian. If that temple begins to emit a message, it will have a significant distorting effect on perception, just like the church -- and traditional religion doesn't have the power of computer aided psychological operations.
Paul had one-on-one meetings with... Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Well now there is a truy hideous beast to consider: What do you get when you cross Rand Paul's megalomaniacal motives with a sociopath who has the means, opportunity, and willingness to perform mass psychological experiments? Let's find out!
In most of Europe, the "economically conservative but socially liberal" parties have economic policies to he left of the Democrats,
Not in terms of tax progressivity. American has managed to export Reaganomics to the world. "Socialist" France, to take but one example, has a much lower top marginal tax and higher income concentration than America had in our golden era -- 1950s and 1960s. Details here.
foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof?
Think of the big picture. If the future you are describing really happens, with the vast majority of society scraping for an ever smaller piece of the pie, what would be the natural outcome? What skills would be in demand?
There would be a lot of big crime targetted at the very few, very rich and the corporations (giant concentrations of assets imply large scale criminal operations). There would be a lot of petty crime between the proletariate (mostly crimes of opportunity with a low profit margin, probably not much of a career there except maybe in racketeering). Maybe some shakedown operations not too far removed from mass copyright enforcement. There would be religious and ideological pontification, offering hope to hopeless people, whether substantive or illusory. There would be a lot of civil unrest, and a lot of mechanisms for suppressing that unrest (tough to say which side will have the upper hand at any moment, but both sides will have openings).
So: Information security, physical security, ideology / idolism / propaganda and counter-propaganda, sockpuppet armies and microtargetted mass messaging, law enforcement and thuggery, lickspittle to the wealthy, and influence management and peddling, off the top of my head.
Consider what postmodern feudalism might look like. That should be a reasonable picture, if what you suggest should come to pass.
Slashdot Mirror
I really liked my last snarky response, but I just thought of another one:
Those in-app purchases require an account password - that's a parental responsibility. Allowing the kids to know the password is no different than sending them to the toy store with a blank check. Not only are the parents not teaching their children to take responsibility for their actions, the parents themselves aren't being responsible.
I've long been thinking the same thing about crosswalk signals. Children whose parents fail to teach them to look at the vehicular traffic signals to know when it is safe to cross are not giving their children an important life skill. Spending taxpayer money on crosswalk signals, just to protect the children of a few incompetent parents, is grossly wasteful nanny-stateism. If we don't allow natural car-versus-pedestrian fatalities to punish stupid parents by killing their children, how will they ever learn?
If they can do that, those children have much larger issues than a $4 charge - they have stupid and irresponsible parents, who are not only providing inadequate supervision, but are incompetent at teaching their children life skills.
Your observation, whether true or not, does not make the transactions efficient. Inefficient transactions are bad for the economy, regardless of their cause. Do you want American companies to lose money? Do you hate America?
>> Because its their job to hate people who take advantage of others in matters of trade?
> Very true. A wholly free market is actually quite toxic, as a certain Adam Smith noted. Especially when it's dishonest.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes! Exactly this.
the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many users as possible."
Because that is what we pay them to do. And there is a very good reason; because private firms measure customer satisfaction through the lens of maximization of profit (fairly short run profit in the case of apps), and the FTC measures it through imperfect objective analysis of the rational self-interest and informedness of the transaction participants. Gee, here's a surprise: Those two measures don't always agree, and sometimes, when they are far enough out of whack, it actually increases GDP in the long run if you limit the freedom of people to engage in inefficienty transactions.
A really good example of such potentially inefficient transactions is children, who do not understand how much time and effort it costs to acquire money, are in the throes of video game passion and a screen pops up saying, "Win More, Only $3.99! Buy Now!"
Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented...
A market filled with efficient transactions increases GDP in the long run relative to a market with less efficient transactions. So, tell me, Joshua Wright; do you hate the economy? Do you want a lower GDP? Do you want our corporations to lose money? Do want our wealthiest stockholders to have to buy slightly smaller Gulfstreams? Answer me, Mr. Wright: Do you hate America?
So Cabinet-level officials such as the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence have committed perjury during Congressional testimony or been held in Contempt of Congress before?
No, they haven't - every other time officials of that level have been about to be held in Contempt of Congress, the official caved and supplied Congress with what was being asked.
Have you heard of Ollie North?
Neither side wants this to go to court, and both sides know it. The AARC wants a settlement they can point to for high pressure settlement letters to other defendants, and the car companies want a non-revokable license for these devices. I'd give it a 90%+ confidence that this will result in an undisclosed settlement within a year, and while we won't know the number they settle for, I'm guessing it won't be enough to make a blip on the car companies' quarterly reports.
Isn't self-hosting a violation of most ISP EULAs?
I think so, if you have user-grade service, but I pay for a commercial-grade Internet connection that comes with a static IP for running services, and I run three hosted servers. Freedom isn't free (but it is a lot of fun). :)
Ever wonder if maybe that rule has less to do with bandwidth and more to do with preventing the creation of a peer-to-peer, decentralized internet?
I think there's some truth to that, if for no other reason than that the ISP probably would rather not have the headache associated with average idiots running servers. They're run by guys with MBAs who genuinely believe that centralized is inherently better -- like to the level that they don't even grasp what you're saying at first, if you try to explain the benefits of decentralized.
Anyone have other theories why this number is so much higher than the 5% of people who are just "late"?
The first window lasts from 0.08 years to 0.5 years, while the second window lasts from 0.5 years to 7.0 years. The relative window width is (7.0 - 0.5) / (0.5 - 0.08) = 6.5 / 0.42 = 15.47. So if each person only had zero or one debts, and no debt was ever paid off, you'd expect there to be 15.47 times as many debt holders in the second window as in the first. 15.47 * 5% = 77%. So the fact that it is at 35% means that there is some combination of people being in both categories and people paying off their debt while it is "In Collections." If it was 5%, or 77%, you'd be able to make a pretty solid guess that something was hinky, but 35% is in the "could be perfectly reasonable" range.
I'll also echo the sentiment that some creditors do a horrible job of billing. I had a large outstanding debt for years before finding it on my credit report. The company had a typo in my address from the original signup, but had been getting copies of my credit report which had my correct address. They sent all the bills to the incorrect address they had on file, never once contacted me at the address on file with the credit reporting company they had been contacting.
I can't find words for how much I hate Congress and the President for this.
I can. But I'm afraid that if I use them in public, I could be put on the secret watch list and have to face extra scrutiny in every LEO encounter when "possible terrorist, report to FBI" pops up on their computer.
Of course, that chilling effect means that the peaceful feedback mechanism that is supposed to moderate government overreach is being attenuated. When that moderation system is weakened, excesses grow. Fortunately, as The Declaration of Independence notes, "accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." So we have time.
But time grows short; The Declaration does not end with that phrase.
Decentralized Internet is badly needed
Very true, that is the only real solution to this problem. Whether corporations, governments, or criminals, the value in surveillance is too great to be resisted. The only solution is increasing the cost and detecting it when it happens. Decentralization will both make it more expensive to do generalized surveillance, and make it harder to do it without getting caught.
and nothing seems to be in works...
Not as true.
OwnCloud lets you host your own dropbox, mobile-to-desktop sync, etc.
MediaGoblin lets you host your own replacement for YouTube.
Asterisk lets you host an end-to-end encrypted replacement for Skype.
Tor and I2P let you slip past your ISP's surveillance net.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more at Stop-Prism.org.
Not to mention if chemical weapons were a casus belli, just about every country in the world would be a legitimate target.
Exactly. Like marijuana and copyright infringement for foreign policy.
Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.
Can you quote me the part where I was being hypocritical? Can you show me where I said that I supported our funding of Egypt or Saudi Arabia? Or are you just trying to falsely discredit me because you don't like my opinion?
Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.
Not for me. For me, the problem is that my government arms Israel. I accept that many nations handle their regional bood-debt feuds with more bloodshed. It's stupid and self-propagating, but fine, go ahead, if that's your thing. But if you blow my paycheck on your cock-waving bullets, you become subject to my judgment of your actions.
Or, they could become less obstinate in blocking FOIA requests.
Why not have a herd of magical pink unicorns travel to DC and explain the problem to them. That seems like a more likely solution.
Here's my latest Snowden / Binney 2016 bumper sticker art, suitable for printing at 2.75" x 5" cropped size plus a .125" bleed, 300 DPI, on vinyl:
PNG
Vector (LibreOffice Draw)
This is my original artwork, CC BY-NC-SA, so print a pile and spread them around if you like. I use psprint.com, and I recommend searching "vinyl bumper stickers" on DuckDuckGo, where psprint is usually running a coupon in the search results. I haven't received the color proofs for this version yet, but these are corrected from a previous batch and should be pretty good.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo or PSPrint, and Snowden/Binney is (perhaps unfortunately) neither a real nor a realistic campaign. This is just for giggles.
When travelling from the UK to Chile... Flying is pretty much the only sensible option for me right now.
I pretty much hate the entire experience but there are not better alternatives for when you NEED to travel to some places.
When travelling in and around the UK I would never fly if I can avoid it as the entire experience has become pretty inconvenient.
Excellent -- it sounds like you are making all reasonable efforts to cut their cashflow.
>> There's also question of motivation. Why would soldiers waste expensive missiles for some irrelevant passenger plane?
> To shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft. They had already shot down a Ukrainian transport plane and a Ukrainian fighter within the previous week. They were on a roll.
That's the same point looneycyborg was attempting to make; that it was not terrorism because it was not an attempt to target civilians.
Though I agree with your accurate and informative correction regarding the civilian flight route issue.
This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league.
Bob9113 here. Don't tell my potential customers what I can and can't supply. You don't know my inventory, nor my procurement abilities. Though you are right that the price would be substantially above $50,000.
"Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."
Remember those stickers on the registers at K-Mart, facing the cashier, with the letters, "TYFSOK"? It stands for, "Thank You For Shopping Our K-Mart." The sticker was to remind the beleagured minimum wage employee to recite the words. Did anyone, ever, feel that the person mechanically parroting that catch phrase actually cared? How about the greeters at Wal Mart? (I think they've pretty much gone away, like the TYFSOK stickers)
You can teach an automaton to mimick human emotion, but even when it is an actual human such mimickry is patronizing and irritating. If you want human warmth, hire warm humans (downside; warm humans who can keep their positive mental attitude while working at an airport are expensive and they need time to recover from their shifts).
If you are going to use computers, embrace their natural advantages. Computers are fast, predictable, and emotionless. Those can be good characteristics in a user interface -- particularly when the customer just wants to get the process finished and move on. Work with the entire industry to develop a standard interface and sequence so the user and bang through it without even engaging their brain -- everyone is better off with travellers on autopilot. Painting a computer in whore's makeup won't make it a lover for any but the most desperate.
And, for you air travellers, a quick question: Why are you still endorsing them? Why are you still agreeing to be subjected to the TSA and the awful customer service of the airlines? Have you really made all reasonable efforts to switch to alternatives? If you aren't making significant personal sacrifices to cut their cashflow, you are lending aid and comfort to the enemy. I've driven 6,000 miles in the past year avoiding air travel. What are you doing?
While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release.
"But Teacher! Billy is punching people, so why can't I punch people?!?"
If you have empirical data to present on the risk of the current levels of radiation exposure measured in QALYs, and an argument for adjusting the current regulated level, present it. But saying that we should ease our regulation on this form of harm, merely because you assert that another form of harm is insufficiently regulated, is manipulative and irrational.
But the philosophical core of the region and the tech industry remains fundamentally progressive.
Never underestimate the power of a god. And make no mistake about it; to many in The Valley, Zuck is a god. Even among those for whom he is not, most worship at the temple of Facebook with more dedication, trust, and fervor than the average Christian. If that temple begins to emit a message, it will have a significant distorting effect on perception, just like the church -- and traditional religion doesn't have the power of computer aided psychological operations.
Paul had one-on-one meetings with ... Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Well now there is a truy hideous beast to consider: What do you get when you cross Rand Paul's megalomaniacal motives with a sociopath who has the means, opportunity, and willingness to perform mass psychological experiments? Let's find out!
In most of Europe, the "economically conservative but socially liberal" parties have economic policies to he left of the Democrats,
Not in terms of tax progressivity. American has managed to export Reaganomics to the world. "Socialist" France, to take but one example, has a much lower top marginal tax and higher income concentration than America had in our golden era -- 1950s and 1960s. Details here.
foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof?
Think of the big picture. If the future you are describing really happens, with the vast majority of society scraping for an ever smaller piece of the pie, what would be the natural outcome? What skills would be in demand?
There would be a lot of big crime targetted at the very few, very rich and the corporations (giant concentrations of assets imply large scale criminal operations). There would be a lot of petty crime between the proletariate (mostly crimes of opportunity with a low profit margin, probably not much of a career there except maybe in racketeering). Maybe some shakedown operations not too far removed from mass copyright enforcement. There would be religious and ideological pontification, offering hope to hopeless people, whether substantive or illusory. There would be a lot of civil unrest, and a lot of mechanisms for suppressing that unrest (tough to say which side will have the upper hand at any moment, but both sides will have openings).
So: Information security, physical security, ideology / idolism / propaganda and counter-propaganda, sockpuppet armies and microtargetted mass messaging, law enforcement and thuggery, lickspittle to the wealthy, and influence management and peddling, off the top of my head.
Consider what postmodern feudalism might look like. That should be a reasonable picture, if what you suggest should come to pass.
Unrelated server crash. Try this one. I'll have the original URL back up as soon as I get this new box built.
Sorry, I only support candidates who can provide me with vector-based artwork.
Here you go: LibreOffice Draw format.