Maybe it's that the UK is too far away or that the writer doesn't get it personally. "Web site that sold groceries " was never the business model. They did that, but to paraphrase JFK "not because it's easy, but because it's hard". Once you can perfect getting fresh peaches delivered via an Internet order, everything else is easy.
They were a tiered distribution company. They would have become a combination of Wal-Mart without the storefronts and UPS. Their two edges were
1) dis intermediate all the retail outlets that all sell the same things. The profit margin in groceries is razor thin (again, they did the hard thing first). Eliminate the stores and employees, replace them with largely automated warehouses and drivers and you change the entire profit dynamic. Walmart.com and vons.com don't get this benefit since they still have to support physical storefronts. Amazon gets this benefit and does pretty well. People have figured out by now that Amazon isn't just an internet bookstore, Webvan died before it could get there.
2)Use the internet as the front end of the business. That's pretty obvious.
"Webvan -- none of whose senior executives or investors had any experience in the supermarket trade". Umm... yeah, that experience would have been useless since they didn't run supermarkets. They did have one of the main architects of Walmarts inventory and distribution system. They were damn good at what they did. If they had an unhappy customer I never met him.
They died from dried up funding more than overspending (though they did that too). They were just about at the point of doing the "since we have a truck coming by your house anyway, why don't we also drop off your Netflix movie, next semester's textbooks and that creepy Rei Ayanami doll you ordered from Japan?". Without that Netflix has had to spend huge effort to get a (kick ass frankly) distribution system done via USPS. Amazon has their affiliate program where you can get all sorts of odd stuff from Amazon, but they don't have that "last mile" solved. If you order stuff in one order from 7 different affiliates you have to pay 7 different shipping fees and deal with 7 different shipments from different shipping companies. At least one of those shipments will get screwed up and one other will come from some shipper that won't leave it without a signature. Webvan was coming by your house anyway to drop off your groceries.
And, yes, I did indeed ride a small position in WBVN all the way to $0.00. They could have been saved at any point and I still think they would be a huge company today.
This was my first thought when I heard this story. Their de facto ownership of the Clearwater PD seems to have worked well enough that the program is being expanded globally. I assume, true to style, that most/all of the Co$' "private" security for this demonstration were off duty constables? Lovely legal way to buy the hearts and minds of the cops. If the cops are recruited to the cult they can even count on getting their money back from them.
As another poster said, Oracle makes this trivially easy to do with data replication or warehousing or just a hot standby database. Even in old versions you could run in archivelog mode, ftp the log files to the data warehouse and have that database roll forward the log files.
The only reasons not to do this are business reasons and data security reasons. Concerns about this customer getting acces to other customer's data or getting access to info that may be about that customer but is company confidential to *your* company.
Or if this is a multi-terrabyte database and this cusomter thinks they up to the second data. If they want that - they need to cough up some coin.
"But there was far more than 48 hours of grounded flights contributing to the economic trouble in the wake of 9/11"
Of course, but I'm not sure anyone realized just how much impact the "stuff" economy would get hit if we had not gotten the planes back in the air. We depend on air freight more than we think we do. Not too many people would starve if they were down for a week, but your supermarket (as an example) would look very different very quickly.
Industries like cut flowers would implode fast. I wouldn't miss them all that much, but it adds up to a lot of people out of work. A lot of core infrastructure assumes that a critical spare part can be fedexed overnight - no spares are kept on hand. Your power grid goes down for lack of a $100 part and it snowballs from there.
At the time the news talked about people stranded various places. That's a bummer. I was working in manufacturing then and was starting to hear a lot of panic. "Just in time" manufacturing and management pressure to increase inventory turns means nobody keeps supplies on hand. Somewhere in teh critical chain there is frequently something that you can't get soon enough by truck or train.
Just because the airlines can't make money doesn't mean that people won't fly and won't fly more and more. Airlines have never made a long term profit since the Wright brothers. Despite that people fly more and more and the presence of the airlines are a big stimulus to the economy.
Does anyone remember when all the US flights were grounded after the twin tower bombings? The US economy came to a complete halt.
This is also obviously global, not just US. China is the big grower in flight miles in the next 30 years.
This is largely a beer style issue. If you truly love Budweiser or some other modern light lager - it is difficult and expensive to match them. The style is largely designed as an end point in the optimization of very large scale brewing. One simple example: it's nearly impossible to duplicate the very very pale color of Budweiser. You need to handle everything with great delicacy to avoid maillard reactions. The late Doug "Dougweiser" King got as close as anyone in trying to duplicate American mass lager and found out just how hard it is to do small scale.
If you really want a bud - it's much cheaper to go to the local Piggly Wiggly.
If you really like artisanal beer style - you are in much better shape. Belgian ales, biÃre de garde, etc. These are styles that come from small scale origins. They are hard to scale up to mega-brew scale so they tend to be very expensive.
Win! I can make a darn good Belgian dubble style beer for about 1/10 what I can buy it for. It's actually a pretty easy style to get close to. You can even use cheaper american berley and hops and make a less authentic but darn good beer.
"Also, it's the ongoing challenge of her wandering off or forgetting basic needs that's been the hardest for my family to deal with."
BINGO! An improvement that makes it so they can feed themselves and use the bathroom is the difference between keeping them home and putting them in a nursing home. Those are the things that force families to throw in the towel.
My other initial though is that this an off label use of an existing drug. Nobody *has* to wait for the FDA to do anything. If there are no huge downside risks this is going to be tried by many if not most people dealing with Alzheimer's.
It's actually fine in my sports car. It's lightweight enough that I can creep along very slowly with my foot off the clutch. Brutal is my Focus with a 6 speed manual and a tall 1st gear.
"The term you're looking for is standing wave. The problem isn't actually the breaking, it's everyone not giving enough room between themselves and the person ahead of them to absorb small slowdowns."
Intuitively correct, but not completely. In reality while driving on a supersaturated freeway (bumper to bumper @ 30-40 mph) EVERYBODY is tailgating. If some minority of drivers decide to follow the spacing rules they taught in drivers ed, what happens? A gap opens up. That gap will be used opportunistically by other drivers trying to sidestep through traffic. In other words, people will swerve in front of them and cut them off. The gap originally opened up is not large enough for another driver to SAFELY merge into that spot. The end result is even heavier emergency braking by the good Samaritan that tried to leave space. Also a greater chance of a rear end accident than would have been cause by tailgating like everyone else.
Actually driving in gridlock traffic is a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the participants (at least in SoCal) have long ago figured out that the "always defect" strategy works best.
"So I guess I don't understand how a candidate's supposed "belief" in the Constitution would cause him to apply some heightened level of protection to virtual "papers" and "effects" housed on a server owned by some third party in California. That would be above the requirements of the Constitution--such laws would be constitutional, but I don't see where you get your interpretation that the Constitution requires such a level of privacy."
It doesn't. It's the other side of the coin - it specifically enjoins the violation of that privacy without due process.
"What are you talking about? The Constitution says nothing about Internet privacy, so Ron Paul would leave that issue to local control or the free market"
Maybe you remember this bit:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That's your constitutional right of privacy right there. And it's not even a "congress shall make no law" clause like the 1st amendment has, it's a flat out ban on snooping without probable cause.
I used to know a kid named "Ducky" that grew up to do a lot of porn shoots. He had a Donald Duck tattoo on his arm back then. Unless he had it removed it has to be in a bunch of '80s porn. Of course, nobody looks at the guy and he was particularly ugly too.
Unofficially, they will know perfectly well what it will do. If there are two roughly equal ways to implement a desired feature and and they know one of them breaks on the hacked phone -- that is the one that will be used. Apple would reverse engineer an unrelated reason for why they picked that implementation.
How do you know? Seriously? How do you know?,.
Simply because I've seen it done many many times. It's standard business practice. Heck, I've seen just Microsoft do it a dozen times. I can think of a dozen times between DOS 3.2 and Windows 3.1/DOS 5. I've seen pharmaceutical companies intentionally sabotage generic competition with this tactic.
What they do have is a contract with AT&T to ensure and protect their exclusive carrier rights. If they don't do everything legally possible to make sure people can't switch carriers - they will sure Apple for everything they can.
I'm absolutely positive that AT&T's lawsuit would fail if they tried to sue Apple for not bricking hacked iPhones. No judge would prosecute that. Of course, that is assuming AT&T would themselves recognise that not bricking the hacked iPhone constitutes breach of contract. It's only obvious now that the update is actually going to brick the iPhone.
Of course the suit you mention would fail. They wouldn't sue for that. They would sue claiming that Apple did not exercise due diligence in protecting their exclusivity. Doesn't even really matter if they win, the goal is to tie Apple up in court and squeeze concessions out of them to settle.
"Except your statement assumes that Apple hacked a few iPods into the exact same state as all the hacked iPhones and already ran a patch to see what would happen."
IF you think they haven't already, I'd have to say you are barking mad.
"My feeling is why waste that time and moeny?"
What does it cost to have some junior level dev guy hack one and play around with it for a day and write up a report? Basically nothing.
"THey will build a patch that will work with a non hacked iPhone 100%. They won't spend a single dime testing it on a hacked one (why should they the ROI on that is a negative). "
OF course this is true, but you are answering a different question. Real testing and "validation" would be very expensive. Particularly since that validation would have to meet the standards of AT&T, which obviously has a vested interest in having any such thing fail validation testing.
"Simply say we can;t guarantee what it will do on a system with a changed state not done by Apple."
Unofficially, they will know perfectly well what it will do. If there are two roughly equal ways to implement a desired feature and and they know one of them breaks on the hacked phone -- that is the one that will be used. Apple would reverse engineer an unrelated reason for why they picked that implementation.
"From what some posters are posting on here (not the parent just what I have read) is that Apple should somehow make sure the patch will work with every combination of a hacked iPhone. Hmm wonder what that would cost."
They have no such obligation, totally agree. What they do have is a contract with AT&T to ensure and protect their exclusive carrier rights. If they don't do everything legally possible to make sure people can't switch carriers - they will sure Apple for everything they can.
So, are you just going to watch Firefly reruns until George Clooney and Sci-Fi finish and run the mini series based on The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer? I empathize, but it may still be a long time
Spacedev is still out there. They first came to my attention a few months ago when they agreed to house Bussard's electrostatic fusion experimental rig. No idea if they still have it, but it's an interesting little space company in the same general niche that SC is/was
Are you planning on making option and futures contracts available? It would be interesting to be able to do things like strangles, collars and calendar spreads. And Forex! WoW against Everquest currencies! Schools don't teach finance anymore - maybe something like this could take its place.
Cingular told me the exact same thing. Currently my daughter has had her phone confiscated for a month because that's only thing I can actually do about it.
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs and makes a slinkity sound? A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing! Everyone knows it's Slinky. It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun, it's a wonderful toy. It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun, It's a wonderful toy. It's fun for a girl or a boy.
I'd be surprised if any single thing replaced the idea of "fixed work for fixed wages". The idea is bound to persist in ever more limited fashion, just like things that look like medieval guilds still exist in some places. I think you'd have to agree that the old idea of going to school, going to some company, working there 30 years, retiring on a pension, die is, itself already dead.
Certainly a higher percentage will be self employed.
Sadly, an even higher percentage will be unemployed/unemployable. We (particularly the US) are raising more and more "workers" who are not qualified to do any work that actually needs to be done. There is no future in screwing parts together on an assembly line for 40 hours a week (that being the worker the US public school system is best at producing). There are not that many lawns to be mowed, and you will be obsoleted by a Roomba mower eventually.
As a civilization we need to figure out what we are going to do about these people. Right now we have downtown areas of people driven to alcoholism and psychosis that in prior times would have been just fine "down to the farm" behind a plow. The percentage of people that don't have the basic tools to function in the 21st century is much much higher.
"Everyone will be a shareholder and be paid only in dividends"? Very possible, though a limited partner may make no sense. People who make more in a year from stock options and profit sharing than they do in base salary are already in this position.
Hippie Communes? Not *quite* as unlikely as it sounds. Capitalism requires a scarcity of resources to motivate people. Given some disruptive technology, like semi-mature nanotech, that removes scarcity of basic survival needs and the hippie commune becomes a viable economic unit. Other than that... yeah, probably not.
As for in your lifetime? Who knows, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow and not see any sign of such a transition in your lifetime.
"having a job" is a historical aberration that began with the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago and is dying as we speak. It has never been a good way of making money, and often a good way to starve yourself and your family. For every $100M CEO in the past 150 years there have been thousands that died in debt and virtual slavery to some rigged "company store", "company town" scam that was designed to have them sell their family farms and move to the cities to make.money.fast.
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Maybe it's that the UK is too far away or that the writer doesn't get it personally. "Web site that sold groceries " was never the business model. They did that, but to paraphrase JFK "not because it's easy, but because it's hard". Once you can perfect getting fresh peaches delivered via an Internet order, everything else is easy.
They were a tiered distribution company. They would have become a combination of Wal-Mart without the storefronts and UPS. Their two edges were
1) dis intermediate all the retail outlets that all sell the same things. The profit margin in groceries is razor thin (again, they did the hard thing first). Eliminate the stores and employees, replace them with largely automated warehouses and drivers and you change the entire profit dynamic. Walmart.com and vons.com don't get this benefit since they still have to support physical storefronts. Amazon gets this benefit and does pretty well. People have figured out by now that Amazon isn't just an internet bookstore, Webvan died before it could get there.
2)Use the internet as the front end of the business. That's pretty obvious.
"Webvan -- none of whose senior executives or investors had any experience in the supermarket trade". Umm... yeah, that experience would have been useless since they didn't run supermarkets. They did have one of the main architects of Walmarts inventory and distribution system. They were damn good at what they did. If they had an unhappy customer I never met him.
They died from dried up funding more than overspending (though they did that too). They were just about at the point of doing the "since we have a truck coming by your house anyway, why don't we also drop off your Netflix movie, next semester's textbooks and that creepy Rei Ayanami doll you ordered from Japan?". Without that Netflix has had to spend huge effort to get a (kick ass frankly) distribution system done via USPS. Amazon has their affiliate program where you can get all sorts of odd stuff from Amazon, but they don't have that "last mile" solved. If you order stuff in one order from 7 different affiliates you have to pay 7 different shipping fees and deal with 7 different shipments from different shipping companies. At least one of those shipments will get screwed up and one other will come from some shipper that won't leave it without a signature. Webvan was coming by your house anyway to drop off your groceries.
And, yes, I did indeed ride a small position in WBVN all the way to $0.00. They could have been saved at any point and I still think they would be a huge company today.
This was my first thought when I heard this story. Their de facto ownership of the Clearwater PD seems to have worked well enough that the program is being expanded globally. I assume, true to style, that most/all of the Co$' "private" security for this demonstration were off duty constables? Lovely legal way to buy the hearts and minds of the cops. If the cops are recruited to the cult they can even count on getting their money back from them.
As another poster said, Oracle makes this trivially easy to do with data replication or warehousing or just a hot standby database. Even in old versions you could run in archivelog mode, ftp the log files to the data warehouse and have that database roll forward the log files.
The only reasons not to do this are business reasons and data security reasons. Concerns about this customer getting acces to other customer's data or getting access to info that may be about that customer but is company confidential to *your* company.
Or if this is a multi-terrabyte database and this cusomter thinks they up to the second data. If they want that - they need to cough up some coin.
"But there was far more than 48 hours of grounded flights contributing to the economic trouble in the wake of 9/11"
Of course, but I'm not sure anyone realized just how much impact the "stuff" economy would get hit if we had not gotten the planes back in the air. We depend on air freight more than we think we do. Not too many people would starve if they were down for a week, but your supermarket (as an example) would look very different very quickly.
Industries like cut flowers would implode fast. I wouldn't miss them all that much, but it adds up to a lot of people out of work. A lot of core infrastructure assumes that a critical spare part can be fedexed overnight - no spares are kept on hand. Your power grid goes down for lack of a $100 part and it snowballs from there.
At the time the news talked about people stranded various places. That's a bummer. I was working in manufacturing then and was starting to hear a lot of panic. "Just in time" manufacturing and management pressure to increase inventory turns means nobody keeps supplies on hand. Somewhere in teh critical chain there is frequently something that you can't get soon enough by truck or train.
In the most promising tests it gets it from scrubbing the CO2 output of coal fired power plants.
Just because the airlines can't make money doesn't mean that people won't fly and won't fly more and more. Airlines have never made a long term profit since the Wright brothers. Despite that people fly more and more and the presence of the airlines are a big stimulus to the economy.
Does anyone remember when all the US flights were grounded after the twin tower bombings? The US economy came to a complete halt.
This is also obviously global, not just US. China is the big grower in flight miles in the next 30 years.
This is largely a beer style issue. If you truly love Budweiser or some other modern light lager - it is difficult and expensive to match them. The style is largely designed as an end point in the optimization of very large scale brewing. One simple example: it's nearly impossible to duplicate the very very pale color of Budweiser. You need to handle everything with great delicacy to avoid maillard reactions. The late Doug "Dougweiser" King got as close as anyone in trying to duplicate American mass lager and found out just how hard it is to do small scale.
If you really want a bud - it's much cheaper to go to the local Piggly Wiggly.
If you really like artisanal beer style - you are in much better shape. Belgian ales, biÃre de garde, etc. These are styles that come from small scale origins. They are hard to scale up to mega-brew scale so they tend to be very expensive.
Win! I can make a darn good Belgian dubble style beer for about 1/10 what I can buy it for. It's actually a pretty easy style to get close to. You can even use cheaper american berley and hops and make a less authentic but darn good beer.
"Also, it's the ongoing challenge of her wandering off or forgetting basic needs that's been the hardest for my family to deal with."
BINGO! An improvement that makes it so they can feed themselves and use the bathroom is the difference between keeping them home and putting them in a nursing home. Those are the things that force families to throw in the towel.
My other initial though is that this an off label use of an existing drug. Nobody *has* to wait for the FDA to do anything. If there are no huge downside risks this is going to be tried by many if not most people dealing with Alzheimer's.
It's actually fine in my sports car. It's lightweight enough that I can creep along very slowly with my foot off the clutch. Brutal is my Focus with a 6 speed manual and a tall 1st gear.
"The term you're looking for is standing wave. The problem isn't actually the breaking, it's everyone not giving enough room between themselves and the person ahead of them to absorb small slowdowns."
Intuitively correct, but not completely. In reality while driving on a supersaturated freeway (bumper to bumper @ 30-40 mph) EVERYBODY is tailgating. If some minority of drivers decide to follow the spacing rules they taught in drivers ed, what happens? A gap opens up. That gap will be used opportunistically by other drivers trying to sidestep through traffic. In other words, people will swerve in front of them and cut them off. The gap originally opened up is not large enough for another driver to SAFELY merge into that spot. The end result is even heavier emergency braking by the good Samaritan that tried to leave space. Also a greater chance of a rear end accident than would have been cause by tailgating like everyone else.
Actually driving in gridlock traffic is a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the participants (at least in SoCal) have long ago figured out that the "always defect" strategy works best.
"So I guess I don't understand how a candidate's supposed "belief" in the Constitution would cause him to apply some heightened level of protection to virtual "papers" and "effects" housed on a server owned by some third party in California. That would be above the requirements of the Constitution--such laws would be constitutional, but I don't see where you get your interpretation that the Constitution requires such a level of privacy."
It doesn't. It's the other side of the coin - it specifically enjoins the violation of that privacy without due process.
"What are you talking about? The Constitution says nothing about Internet privacy, so Ron Paul would leave that issue to local control or the free market"
Maybe you remember this bit:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That's your constitutional right of privacy right there. And it's not even a "congress shall make no law" clause like the 1st amendment has, it's a flat out ban on snooping without probable cause.
I used to know a kid named "Ducky" that grew up to do a lot of porn shoots. He had a Donald Duck tattoo on his arm back then. Unless he had it removed it has to be in a bunch of '80s porn. Of course, nobody looks at the guy and he was particularly ugly too.
Simply because I've seen it done many many times. It's standard business practice. Heck, I've seen just Microsoft do it a dozen times. I can think of a dozen times between DOS 3.2 and Windows 3.1/DOS 5. I've seen pharmaceutical companies intentionally sabotage generic competition with this tactic.
I'm absolutely positive that AT&T's lawsuit would fail if they tried to sue Apple for not bricking hacked iPhones. No judge would prosecute that. Of course, that is assuming AT&T would themselves recognise that not bricking the hacked iPhone constitutes breach of contract. It's only obvious now that the update is actually going to brick the iPhone.
Of course the suit you mention would fail. They wouldn't sue for that. They would sue claiming that Apple did not exercise due diligence in protecting their exclusivity. Doesn't even really matter if they win, the goal is to tie Apple up in court and squeeze concessions out of them to settle."Cops everywhere work on the premise that you're either a "good guy" or you're a "scumbag". "
Or as I've gotten it directly from a member of LAPD - "There are three kinds of people, cops, perps and perps that haven't been caught yet".
"Except your statement assumes that Apple hacked a few iPods into the exact same state as all the hacked iPhones and already ran a patch to see what would happen."
IF you think they haven't already, I'd have to say you are barking mad.
"My feeling is why waste that time and moeny?"
What does it cost to have some junior level dev guy hack one and play around with it for a day and write up a report? Basically nothing.
"THey will build a patch that will work with a non hacked iPhone 100%. They won't spend a single dime testing it on a hacked one (why should they the ROI on that is a negative). "
OF course this is true, but you are answering a different question. Real testing and "validation" would be very expensive. Particularly since that validation would have to meet the standards of AT&T, which obviously has a vested interest in having any such thing fail validation testing.
"Simply say we can;t guarantee what it will do on a system with a changed state not done by Apple."
Unofficially, they will know perfectly well what it will do. If there are two roughly equal ways to implement a desired feature and and they know one of them breaks on the hacked phone -- that is the one that will be used. Apple would reverse engineer an unrelated reason for why they picked that implementation.
"From what some posters are posting on here (not the parent just what I have read) is that Apple should somehow make sure the patch will work with every combination of a hacked iPhone. Hmm wonder what that would cost."
They have no such obligation, totally agree. What they do have is a contract with AT&T to ensure and protect their exclusive carrier rights. If they don't do everything legally possible to make sure people can't switch carriers - they will sure Apple for everything they can.
So, are you just going to watch Firefly reruns until George Clooney and Sci-Fi finish and run the mini series based on The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer? I empathize, but it may still be a long time
Spacedev is still out there. They first came to my attention a few months ago when they agreed to house Bussard's electrostatic fusion experimental rig. No idea if they still have it, but it's an interesting little space company in the same general niche that SC is/was
Are you planning on making option and futures contracts available? It would be interesting to be able to do things like strangles, collars and calendar spreads. And Forex! WoW against Everquest currencies! Schools don't teach finance anymore - maybe something like this could take its place.
Cingular told me the exact same thing. Currently my daughter has had her phone confiscated for a month because that's only thing I can actually do about it.
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs
and makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing!
Everyone knows it's Slinky.
It's Slinky, it's Slinky,
it's fun, it's a wonderful toy.
It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun,
It's a wonderful toy.
It's fun for a girl or a boy.
"having a job" and "doing useful work" are not always/usually the same thing.
I'd be surprised if any single thing replaced the idea of "fixed work for fixed wages". The idea is bound to persist in ever more limited fashion, just like things that look like medieval guilds still exist in some places. I think you'd have to agree that the old idea of going to school, going to some company, working there 30 years, retiring on a pension, die is, itself already dead.
Certainly a higher percentage will be self employed.
Sadly, an even higher percentage will be unemployed/unemployable. We (particularly the US) are raising more and more "workers" who are not qualified to do any work that actually needs to be done. There is no future in screwing parts together on an assembly line for 40 hours a week (that being the worker the US public school system is best at producing). There are not that many lawns to be mowed, and you will be obsoleted by a Roomba mower eventually.
As a civilization we need to figure out what we are going to do about these people. Right now we have downtown areas of people driven to alcoholism and psychosis that in prior times would have been just fine "down to the farm" behind a plow. The percentage of people that don't have the basic tools to function in the 21st century is much much higher.
"Everyone will be a shareholder and be paid only in dividends"? Very possible, though a limited partner may make no sense. People who make more in a year from stock options and profit sharing than they do in base salary are already in this position.
Hippie Communes? Not *quite* as unlikely as it sounds. Capitalism requires a scarcity of resources to motivate people. Given some disruptive technology, like semi-mature nanotech, that removes scarcity of basic survival needs and the hippie commune becomes a viable economic unit. Other than that... yeah, probably not.
As for in your lifetime? Who knows, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow and not see any sign of such a transition in your lifetime.
That's a false dichotomy. Who says investment is the only alternative to working for wages?
"having a job" is a historical aberration that began with the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago and is dying as we speak. It has never been a good way of making money, and often a good way to starve yourself and your family. For every $100M CEO in the past 150 years there have been thousands that died in debt and virtual slavery to some rigged "company store", "company town" scam that was designed to have them sell their family farms and move to the cities to make.money.fast.