A la carte would mean individual channels will be priced much higher. It's very likely your bill will remain the same or increase.
That seems unlikely to me. Any sane proposal would require a-la-carte costs to add up to the same as bundle costs. They can charge $200/mo for a basic cable bundle if they want to, but they'll just go out of business if they do. If you don't make them add up to the same then companies that don't want to do a la carte would just sell channels for $1M/month each and claim to be in compliance with the law.
Cable packages are priced at what the market will bear - they can't make the average package cost more or they'll just lose business.
It's meaningless. Space is REALLY BIG. In fact, space s bigger than time is long. You could have started sending out robots 12 billion years ago and they wouldn't have even made a scratch in colonizing the universe.
Well, it depends on how fast those robots can travel, and how fast they can self-replicate. Compared to a bacterium a swimming pool full of warm media is really big, and yet if you dropped one bacteria into such a pool it probably wouldn't take a day before almost all the nutrients in it were gone.
So sans a few mass extinctions, someone would've been here are a lot sooner - and the Earth is 4 billion years old and we know planet formation doesn't seem to take that long.
That is fairly speculative. What if a series of mass extinctions is actually essential for the formation of intelligent life? If the world were a paradise free of trauma how do you know the result wouldn't just be a big layer of algae and moss?
Intelligence is a survival trait like any other, and you could argue that for it to evolve you need to have something really hard to survive. Well, maybe I should strike that - have humans actually survived anything that really would require intelligence to survive?
In addition to that, they will never be able to actively prevent their own extinction on a solar or galactic level, nor will they be able to actively spread on those levels. They might by chance, but not actively.
The thing is, the ability of humans to potentially avoid a solar/galactic extinction event is certainly not the result of an evolutionary process, per-se. We might happen to have those traits, and they may happen to have arisen due to evolution under entirely different selective pressures, but we've yet to actually survive such an event and nobody can say if the human body (brain and all) is particularly well-designed to do so.
Evolution isn't about a bunch of philosophers looking at pictures of animals and debating which one will survive a volcanic eruption. Evolution is about visiting an island AFTER the eruption and seeing what is left. That's why it works so well.
We're not even orbiting a 1st generation star, for FSM's sake.
Stars had lived their entire lives before ours even formed.
Well, first generation stars were basically pure Hydrogen and Helium since that was just about all that the big bang created. The stars burned intensely and were short-lived, and if they did form planets they were basically brown dwarfs of some sort that would have made great stars if they were just bigger.
I believe the first generation stars tended to be big, hot, short-lived, and end in a supernova. These produced elements other than hydrogen and helium, making life more feasible in later generations of stars, and also making it harder for large, hot stars to form in the first place.
Granted, the first generation of stars didn't really use up much of the cosmic timeline. Second generation stars would have been around longer.
But, we don't know how likely it is for intelligent life to form in the first place, and it only makes sense that it would have been even harder to form in earlier stellar generations due to there being less diversity of stuff for it to work with.
Glad to hear that they changed their tune. For a while Cyanogen was fairly opposed to letting people selectively restrict permissions. At one point he enabled it in a way that basically broke most apps, in the seeming home that the people asking for the feature would go away figuring that it just wasn't possible to do. The problem is that people had been doing this for a while even at that time by intercepting the API calls.
I would love for it to be like XPrivacy. I can feed random data to any app, change it at will, or even just type in the data that I want to feed it (I've always wanted to live in Fiji...:) ).
and this requires root, which is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. as soon as you root, the entire sandbox runtime model is out the window.
Uh, you do realize that root exists on the phone whether it is rooted or not, right? The only thing rooting the phone does is allow you to have some say in how the security works. If the only thing you do is install XPrivacy after rooting the phone, how exactly is that making things LESS secure?
The reason Americans have such incredible reelection rates, given the least popular congress in history, is gerrymandering. That is the practice of elected politicians deciding exactly who is going to be allowed to vote for them next time around.
Oh, please. There are laws against that, which is why in my state we never resort to thosetricks.
Just because I live in California does not mean that I do not have a real and valid interest on who the people of Utah send to DC.
The question really isn't do you care what they do, the question is do you have any right to help them select the people that they send to congress to represent THEIR interests. To that, that answer is a clear and resounding NO, you do not.
Here is my problem with that argument. You're making a moral judgment, and certainly not the only possible one.
If you believe that the best system of governance is one where local constituencies vote for representatives who exclusively represent them and then you live with however those votes come out then of course you're going to object to meddling in somebody else's district.
On the other hand if you believe that the best system of governance is something more like a proportional representation system on a national level, then you're not going to have any moral problem with meddling in somebody else's district, since all you're doing is trying to compensate for the lousy political system in the US.
Now, you can try to argue that the Constitution doesn't establish a proportional democracy with a national election, but that is an argument that also cuts both ways. The Constitution also doesn't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts. So, even if you buy "Constitution trumps/defines morality" then you're still up the creek.
I don't really buy the argument that less populous states get disenfranchised in a proportional system. Each man still gets one vote. In the less-populated states each square mile of land might get fewer votes, but is that really what matters? And just why should the people of California get only 18x more say in the operation of the government than the people of Rhode Island, when there are 38x as many of them?
When I look at the results of the US political system compared to those in Europe, I just find it hard to argue that the founding fathers didn't get it wrong. You can hardly blame them - democracy was a poorly understood thing back in that day. We just cling to the system like it was handed down from God above, when it is nothing more than one particular form of democracy in a world full of many such forms. Why not look at how these various systems perform historically, and then pick what works best?
Can you say malfeasance? It's a massive liability that I'm surprised they're willing to take on.
The problem is that it is hard to prove that the hospital policy was the cause of anything that went wrong.
There is no reason that hours worked shouldn't be regulated in medicine the way it is regulated in professional driving or piloting. We don't let people fly planes for 80 hours per week, so why the heck would we let people do heart surgery for 80 hours per week?
So what you are saying is that Uber is not even a ride "sharing" platform so much as an enabler for unlicensed car service business? I did not know that.
I have to admit that my opinion on Uber was, so far, essentially neutral. However, if what you are saying is true - I would be inclined to reconsider and think of them as a net-negative. If they are a taxi cab - they should register and operate as one, any instant online hailing and optimal vehicle routing sauce notwithstanding.
I will vote accordingly if/when this comes up in my locality.
Uber is basically a pre-booked taxi service. They satisfy the goals of most regulation around taxi services - safety and honesty. They probably do a better job of it than taxi regulations do. The last time I checked the state does not have records of who drove who where and when BEFORE the ride takes place with a conventional taxi.
What is the point of having taxi laws in the first place? Complaining about Uber seems like complaining about automated cars eliminating speeding violations and thus ticket revenue.
For the most part the only thing taxi regulations have done is create cozy business environments for companies that provide a service that everybody avoids like the plague. I know I'd probably only hire a taxi if my life depended on it. A service like Uber has the potential to change that.
In California, for example, drivers-for-hire have to be specifically licensed, and carry $1M liability insurance. Uber provides a $100K "umbrella" for the benefit of passengers, "just in case" the driver isn't insured as required by the company. (But the required insurance level is far less than that required by the state.)
The problem is that the system is built on ancient premises and thus is incredibly inefficient, and propped up by people with vested interests.
The premise cab regulations are built on is that there is no way to know who is picking up who, when, and where. That means that if jack the ripper gets a cab license you have no way to figure out why so many people are disappearing. It also means that there are huge insurance requirements in the hope that insurance companies do something to control who gets issued insurance (outsourcing of quality control, basically).
And yet, we still end up with cabs that are of incredibly poor quality and with fairly marginal drivers in many places. That is because once so much money got made off of regulations like medallion sales there was a ton of regulatory capture.
Today that isn't the world we live in. Today it is possible to book every trip in advance, with credit card companies acting as trusted brokers to protect both consumers and suppliers, and reputation systems for everybody involved. An operator shouldn't need a million dollars in insurance, unless they're driving something the size of a bus. Just how much injury can a car possibly cause to its passengers? You don't need to have cars just driving around so that they're visible so that they can be hailed - you can summon them on demand. The pre-booking means there is a record of who is going where, and since everybody is carrying a cell phone chances are the NSA if not the local police know where everybody is at all times anyway (not that they'd actually use that data to go after such a minor public nuisance as a serial killer).
So, the regulation really needs an overhaul. Just require pre-booking of all trips. Of course, that will be opposed by anybody with a medallion, so good luck with that.
And where does the money for this 'basic income' come from??
Taxes. Productivity is at an all time high.
And even if this scheme worked, you're forgetting an important part of human nature: Most people need to feel like they're earning their way. If they're on the dole, they feel worthless (thus depressed with its attendant issues), and no amount of hobbies and leisure pursuits can change that.
People can donate their time to help others, and they still can work at whatever jobs they can find. Basic income isn't about keeping people from working - it is about keeping people from losing their homes when they are out of work.
I do all kinds of productive stuff in my spare time. Why would that change if I had more of it?
Isn't that a bit like saying that without central planning there would be no way for businesses to start, since no government agency would be able to write the check needed to start an approved business?
Not in the slightest.
I fail to see how. You claimed "Regardless, without public corporate ownership, the pool of capital available for companies to build their businesses would be a small fraction of what it is." That would only be true if some alternative source of funding weren't available.
There is no question that public ownership of companies is a major force driving the US economy. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of doing things.
For example?
Well, I already pointed out central planning. Have the US Government write out a check for $100M to any new business that asks for it. You now have lots of capital available for companies to build their businesses, which was your point. Sure, doing it that way would cause a million other problems, but my point was just that the way the US does things is not the only way they can be done.
Of the cost of living goes up, the money you saved for retirement doesn't. The comfortable lifestyle you plan to have tomorrow is really a poor lifestyle due to inflation.
I don't really expect to have a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, and my personal income is probably in the top few percentiles. For the reasons you state combined with declining birthrates that seems inevitable. Who is going to pay for the retirements of the baby boomers? They can save up all the money in the world, but that money is only useful if somebody is willing to take it from them in exchange for some good or service, and when they're the ones with all the money and none of the labor they'll find themselves parting with quite a bit of it.
And what do you mean most people working today don't seem to expect the same standard of living as their parents??? are they mad? My parents didn't have computers and cell phones in their day...
Yup, and I don't own a horse like my great-grandparents probably did.
I do live in a smaller house than my parents did at my age, despite my income probably being in a higher percentile than theirs was at the time.
Technology is really the only area where people are richer than they've been in the past, since the nature of technology is to cause depreciation.
Now, this is a simplified look at how things work. It's evident that these automatons would require an energy source (although, again, this could be free of monetary cost as well, for the same reason the iron could be free), and of course they'd need to be built first to begin with (same everything-is-free logic applies).
There is still scarcity in a world where there is absolutely no labor. If you tried to extract an infinite amount of energy to power industry the waste heat would make the Earth hotter than the sun. Indeed, an infinite demand for energy can't be satisfied if only due to the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
Obviously things could be a lot cheaper than they are today. A post-labor society would be far wealthier than today's society. However, there is still scarcity.
Suppose I'd like a house with a nice view unimpeded by anything but trees and beautiful landscape as far as the horizon? There is only so many square miles of beautiful landscape on the Earth, so not everybody can exclusively own it in this way.
Plus, if we're going to strip-mine the entire surface of the earth in a quest for free iron, there will be even less room for scenery.:)
I do think a post-labor society is inevitable, and enviable as well. It still will need some way of prioritizing conflicting desires, and that will probably involve some kind of currency. Maybe you want a really fast computer to do research on, and I'd like a bigger back yard. Currency lets me get more than a fair share of land in exchange for you getting more than a fair share in CPU time.
If you're concerned about those outliers who can't find work because they are really disabled or unhirable, what is so bad about charity? 80% of Americans (that includes a huge swath of Democrats, liberals, etc) believe charity works better than government-managed welfare.
Ah, so government-managed welfare is a bad idea, just like evolution and climate change?:)
If charity works so well, then why are so many people stressed out at the thought of losing their jobs and being forced to depend on it?
Regardless, without public corporate ownership, the pool of capital available for companies to build their businesses would be a small fraction of what it is. Although, as you point out, the funding is often very indirect, it's public markets that make much of the capital available that drives establishment and growth of businesses.
Isn't that a bit like saying that without central planning there would be no way for businesses to start, since no government agency would be able to write the check needed to start an approved business?
There is no question that public ownership of companies is a major force driving the US economy. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of doing things.
The matter white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes composed of are fairly different from the matter we normally encounter day-to-day, and yet they're not identical to each other. In the last case we can't really be sure what it is like, lacking a well-supported theory of quantum gravity.
It does require people that can learn rapidly, but other than that you can pretty much write your own paycheck given enough time.
Like I said - you have to win the genetic lottery. Not everybody can learn rapidly.
And there are many who struggle to make more than a basic living in IT even so. Granted, you'll find few in IT starving, but is that really a ringing endorsement for what might very well be the best career field in the US?
Then how do you propose that those displaced workers earn a living? What jobs are they suited for? Where will those jobs come from??
I already said it in my post - basic income. That means you mail every person a check every month sufficient for a basic lifestyle, regardless of need. Nobody has to work to earn a living. Those who are not suited for a job will just live on that income.
Walmart gives a lot of jobs to borderline-retarded and disabled people who aren't capable of more complex work, did you realise that? What are they supposed to do if those jobs go away -- collect welfare??
And it may seem strange to you, but some people are much happier digging ditches.
And with basic income there would be no minimum wage, so if people want to dig ditches for an extra $1/hour because they enjoy the work, they can do it. As far as welfare goes - everybody will be on welfare whether they work or not.
True. It's a shame, really, since his PRIDE is what apparently kept him from sucking it up and fixing it.
Is wanting to not destroy your career pride?
What would have been the consequences if he admitted his mistake as soon as he discovered it? Would he still have gotten a bonus that year? Would he be promoted, after all this cost the company?
An engineer making a mistake is like somebody winning the lottery. If you buy enough tickets, eventually it is inevitable.
While I've seen some engineers do bad things because they were afraid of management, I've never seen a situation in a company this size where the organization was good but one bad engineer was able to release something terrible with no oversight.
I think this is a more systemic problem even than oversight.
Why did this engineer seek to cover up his original mistake? It seems obvious that the engineer believed that revealing the mistake would have negative personal consequences for himself. Organizations that punish people for making mistakes encourage them to cover up mistakes.
It makes more sense to realize that if you have humans doing work then some percentage of the time they will make a mistake. It might be a very low percentage, but mistakes will happen, and this is because humans are fallible and not a reason to pick on the individual who happened to be unlucky.
You then design processes to minimize the risk of mistakes affecting production, and learn from mistakes when they do happen.
When you punish mistakes, even if not officially, then you cause individuals to subvert the entire quality system.
Slashdot Mirror
A la carte would mean individual channels will be priced much higher. It's very likely your bill will remain the same or increase.
That seems unlikely to me. Any sane proposal would require a-la-carte costs to add up to the same as bundle costs. They can charge $200/mo for a basic cable bundle if they want to, but they'll just go out of business if they do. If you don't make them add up to the same then companies that don't want to do a la carte would just sell channels for $1M/month each and claim to be in compliance with the law.
Cable packages are priced at what the market will bear - they can't make the average package cost more or they'll just lose business.
It's meaningless.
Space is REALLY BIG. In fact, space s bigger than time is long.
You could have started sending out robots 12 billion years ago and they wouldn't have even made a scratch in colonizing the universe.
Well, it depends on how fast those robots can travel, and how fast they can self-replicate. Compared to a bacterium a swimming pool full of warm media is really big, and yet if you dropped one bacteria into such a pool it probably wouldn't take a day before almost all the nutrients in it were gone.
So sans a few mass extinctions, someone would've been here are a lot sooner - and the Earth is 4 billion years old and we know planet formation doesn't seem to take that long.
That is fairly speculative. What if a series of mass extinctions is actually essential for the formation of intelligent life? If the world were a paradise free of trauma how do you know the result wouldn't just be a big layer of algae and moss?
Intelligence is a survival trait like any other, and you could argue that for it to evolve you need to have something really hard to survive. Well, maybe I should strike that - have humans actually survived anything that really would require intelligence to survive?
In addition to that, they will never be able to actively prevent their own extinction on a solar or galactic level, nor will they be able to actively spread on those levels. They might by chance, but not actively.
The thing is, the ability of humans to potentially avoid a solar/galactic extinction event is certainly not the result of an evolutionary process, per-se. We might happen to have those traits, and they may happen to have arisen due to evolution under entirely different selective pressures, but we've yet to actually survive such an event and nobody can say if the human body (brain and all) is particularly well-designed to do so.
Evolution isn't about a bunch of philosophers looking at pictures of animals and debating which one will survive a volcanic eruption. Evolution is about visiting an island AFTER the eruption and seeing what is left. That's why it works so well.
We're not even orbiting a 1st generation star, for FSM's sake.
Stars had lived their entire lives before ours even formed.
Well, first generation stars were basically pure Hydrogen and Helium since that was just about all that the big bang created. The stars burned intensely and were short-lived, and if they did form planets they were basically brown dwarfs of some sort that would have made great stars if they were just bigger.
I believe the first generation stars tended to be big, hot, short-lived, and end in a supernova. These produced elements other than hydrogen and helium, making life more feasible in later generations of stars, and also making it harder for large, hot stars to form in the first place.
Granted, the first generation of stars didn't really use up much of the cosmic timeline. Second generation stars would have been around longer.
But, we don't know how likely it is for intelligent life to form in the first place, and it only makes sense that it would have been even harder to form in earlier stellar generations due to there being less diversity of stuff for it to work with.
Glad to hear that they changed their tune. For a while Cyanogen was fairly opposed to letting people selectively restrict permissions. At one point he enabled it in a way that basically broke most apps, in the seeming home that the people asking for the feature would go away figuring that it just wasn't possible to do. The problem is that people had been doing this for a while even at that time by intercepting the API calls.
I would love for it to be like XPrivacy. I can feed random data to any app, change it at will, or even just type in the data that I want to feed it (I've always wanted to live in Fiji... :) ).
and this requires root, which is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. as soon as you root, the entire sandbox runtime model is out the window.
Uh, you do realize that root exists on the phone whether it is rooted or not, right? The only thing rooting the phone does is allow you to have some say in how the security works. If the only thing you do is install XPrivacy after rooting the phone, how exactly is that making things LESS secure?
The reason Americans have such incredible reelection rates, given the least popular congress in history, is gerrymandering. That is the practice of elected politicians deciding exactly who is going to be allowed to vote for them next time around.
Oh, please. There are laws against that, which is why in my state we never resort to those tricks.
Just because I live in California does not mean that I do not have a real and valid interest on who the people of Utah send to DC.
The question really isn't do you care what they do, the question is do you have any right to help them select the people that they send to congress to represent THEIR interests. To that, that answer is a clear and resounding NO, you do not.
Here is my problem with that argument. You're making a moral judgment, and certainly not the only possible one.
If you believe that the best system of governance is one where local constituencies vote for representatives who exclusively represent them and then you live with however those votes come out then of course you're going to object to meddling in somebody else's district.
On the other hand if you believe that the best system of governance is something more like a proportional representation system on a national level, then you're not going to have any moral problem with meddling in somebody else's district, since all you're doing is trying to compensate for the lousy political system in the US.
Now, you can try to argue that the Constitution doesn't establish a proportional democracy with a national election, but that is an argument that also cuts both ways. The Constitution also doesn't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts. So, even if you buy "Constitution trumps/defines morality" then you're still up the creek.
I don't really buy the argument that less populous states get disenfranchised in a proportional system. Each man still gets one vote. In the less-populated states each square mile of land might get fewer votes, but is that really what matters? And just why should the people of California get only 18x more say in the operation of the government than the people of Rhode Island, when there are 38x as many of them?
When I look at the results of the US political system compared to those in Europe, I just find it hard to argue that the founding fathers didn't get it wrong. You can hardly blame them - democracy was a poorly understood thing back in that day. We just cling to the system like it was handed down from God above, when it is nothing more than one particular form of democracy in a world full of many such forms. Why not look at how these various systems perform historically, and then pick what works best?
But what are you going to do? The world you want to live in does not exist.
Simple, install XPrivacy. Problem solved. App wants a IMEI? No problem - just give it a random one, or a different one on each boot.
Couldn't agree more...
Can you say malfeasance? It's a massive liability that I'm surprised they're willing to take on.
The problem is that it is hard to prove that the hospital policy was the cause of anything that went wrong.
There is no reason that hours worked shouldn't be regulated in medicine the way it is regulated in professional driving or piloting. We don't let people fly planes for 80 hours per week, so why the heck would we let people do heart surgery for 80 hours per week?
So what you are saying is that Uber is not even a ride "sharing" platform so much as an enabler for unlicensed car service business? I did not know that.
I have to admit that my opinion on Uber was, so far, essentially neutral. However, if what you are saying is true - I would be inclined to reconsider and think of them as a net-negative. If they are a taxi cab - they should register and operate as one, any instant online hailing and optimal vehicle routing sauce notwithstanding.
I will vote accordingly if/when this comes up in my locality.
Uber is basically a pre-booked taxi service. They satisfy the goals of most regulation around taxi services - safety and honesty. They probably do a better job of it than taxi regulations do. The last time I checked the state does not have records of who drove who where and when BEFORE the ride takes place with a conventional taxi.
What is the point of having taxi laws in the first place? Complaining about Uber seems like complaining about automated cars eliminating speeding violations and thus ticket revenue.
For the most part the only thing taxi regulations have done is create cozy business environments for companies that provide a service that everybody avoids like the plague. I know I'd probably only hire a taxi if my life depended on it. A service like Uber has the potential to change that.
In California, for example, drivers-for-hire have to be specifically licensed, and carry $1M liability insurance. Uber provides a $100K "umbrella" for the benefit of passengers, "just in case" the driver isn't insured as required by the company. (But the required insurance level is far less than that required by the state.)
The problem is that the system is built on ancient premises and thus is incredibly inefficient, and propped up by people with vested interests.
The premise cab regulations are built on is that there is no way to know who is picking up who, when, and where. That means that if jack the ripper gets a cab license you have no way to figure out why so many people are disappearing. It also means that there are huge insurance requirements in the hope that insurance companies do something to control who gets issued insurance (outsourcing of quality control, basically).
And yet, we still end up with cabs that are of incredibly poor quality and with fairly marginal drivers in many places. That is because once so much money got made off of regulations like medallion sales there was a ton of regulatory capture.
Today that isn't the world we live in. Today it is possible to book every trip in advance, with credit card companies acting as trusted brokers to protect both consumers and suppliers, and reputation systems for everybody involved. An operator shouldn't need a million dollars in insurance, unless they're driving something the size of a bus. Just how much injury can a car possibly cause to its passengers? You don't need to have cars just driving around so that they're visible so that they can be hailed - you can summon them on demand. The pre-booking means there is a record of who is going where, and since everybody is carrying a cell phone chances are the NSA if not the local police know where everybody is at all times anyway (not that they'd actually use that data to go after such a minor public nuisance as a serial killer).
So, the regulation really needs an overhaul. Just require pre-booking of all trips. Of course, that will be opposed by anybody with a medallion, so good luck with that.
And where does the money for this 'basic income' come from??
Taxes. Productivity is at an all time high.
And even if this scheme worked, you're forgetting an important part of human nature: Most people need to feel like they're earning their way. If they're on the dole, they feel worthless (thus depressed with its attendant issues), and no amount of hobbies and leisure pursuits can change that.
People can donate their time to help others, and they still can work at whatever jobs they can find. Basic income isn't about keeping people from working - it is about keeping people from losing their homes when they are out of work.
I do all kinds of productive stuff in my spare time. Why would that change if I had more of it?
Isn't that a bit like saying that without central planning there would be no way for businesses to start, since no government agency would be able to write the check needed to start an approved business?
Not in the slightest.
I fail to see how. You claimed "Regardless, without public corporate ownership, the pool of capital available for companies to build their businesses would be a small fraction of what it is." That would only be true if some alternative source of funding weren't available.
There is no question that public ownership of companies is a major force driving the US economy. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of doing things.
For example?
Well, I already pointed out central planning. Have the US Government write out a check for $100M to any new business that asks for it. You now have lots of capital available for companies to build their businesses, which was your point. Sure, doing it that way would cause a million other problems, but my point was just that the way the US does things is not the only way they can be done.
Of the cost of living goes up, the money you saved for retirement doesn't. The comfortable lifestyle you plan to have tomorrow is really a poor lifestyle due to inflation.
I don't really expect to have a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, and my personal income is probably in the top few percentiles. For the reasons you state combined with declining birthrates that seems inevitable. Who is going to pay for the retirements of the baby boomers? They can save up all the money in the world, but that money is only useful if somebody is willing to take it from them in exchange for some good or service, and when they're the ones with all the money and none of the labor they'll find themselves parting with quite a bit of it.
And what do you mean most people working today don't seem to expect the same standard of living as their parents??? are they mad? My parents didn't have computers and cell phones in their day...
Yup, and I don't own a horse like my great-grandparents probably did.
I do live in a smaller house than my parents did at my age, despite my income probably being in a higher percentile than theirs was at the time.
Technology is really the only area where people are richer than they've been in the past, since the nature of technology is to cause depreciation.
Now, this is a simplified look at how things work. It's evident that these automatons would require an energy source (although, again, this could be free of monetary cost as well, for the same reason the iron could be free), and of course they'd need to be built first to begin with (same everything-is-free logic applies).
There is still scarcity in a world where there is absolutely no labor. If you tried to extract an infinite amount of energy to power industry the waste heat would make the Earth hotter than the sun. Indeed, an infinite demand for energy can't be satisfied if only due to the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
Obviously things could be a lot cheaper than they are today. A post-labor society would be far wealthier than today's society. However, there is still scarcity.
Suppose I'd like a house with a nice view unimpeded by anything but trees and beautiful landscape as far as the horizon? There is only so many square miles of beautiful landscape on the Earth, so not everybody can exclusively own it in this way.
Plus, if we're going to strip-mine the entire surface of the earth in a quest for free iron, there will be even less room for scenery. :)
I do think a post-labor society is inevitable, and enviable as well. It still will need some way of prioritizing conflicting desires, and that will probably involve some kind of currency. Maybe you want a really fast computer to do research on, and I'd like a bigger back yard. Currency lets me get more than a fair share of land in exchange for you getting more than a fair share in CPU time.
If you're concerned about those outliers who can't find work because they are really disabled or unhirable, what is so bad about charity? 80% of Americans (that includes a huge swath of Democrats, liberals, etc) believe charity works better than government-managed welfare.
Ah, so government-managed welfare is a bad idea, just like evolution and climate change? :)
If charity works so well, then why are so many people stressed out at the thought of losing their jobs and being forced to depend on it?
Regardless, without public corporate ownership, the pool of capital available for companies to build their businesses would be a small fraction of what it is. Although, as you point out, the funding is often very indirect, it's public markets that make much of the capital available that drives establishment and growth of businesses.
Isn't that a bit like saying that without central planning there would be no way for businesses to start, since no government agency would be able to write the check needed to start an approved business?
There is no question that public ownership of companies is a major force driving the US economy. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of doing things.
Then why do we have a word to differentiate them?
Differentiate what from what?
The matter white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes composed of are fairly different from the matter we normally encounter day-to-day, and yet they're not identical to each other. In the last case we can't really be sure what it is like, lacking a well-supported theory of quantum gravity.
It does require people that can learn rapidly, but other than that you can pretty much write your own paycheck given enough time.
Like I said - you have to win the genetic lottery. Not everybody can learn rapidly.
And there are many who struggle to make more than a basic living in IT even so. Granted, you'll find few in IT starving, but is that really a ringing endorsement for what might very well be the best career field in the US?
Then how do you propose that those displaced workers earn a living? What jobs are they suited for? Where will those jobs come from??
I already said it in my post - basic income. That means you mail every person a check every month sufficient for a basic lifestyle, regardless of need. Nobody has to work to earn a living. Those who are not suited for a job will just live on that income.
Walmart gives a lot of jobs to borderline-retarded and disabled people who aren't capable of more complex work, did you realise that? What are they supposed to do if those jobs go away -- collect welfare??
And it may seem strange to you, but some people are much happier digging ditches.
And with basic income there would be no minimum wage, so if people want to dig ditches for an extra $1/hour because they enjoy the work, they can do it. As far as welfare goes - everybody will be on welfare whether they work or not.
True. It's a shame, really, since his PRIDE is what apparently kept him from sucking it up and fixing it.
Is wanting to not destroy your career pride?
What would have been the consequences if he admitted his mistake as soon as he discovered it? Would he still have gotten a bonus that year? Would he be promoted, after all this cost the company?
An engineer making a mistake is like somebody winning the lottery. If you buy enough tickets, eventually it is inevitable.
While I've seen some engineers do bad things because they were afraid of management, I've never seen a situation in a company this size where the organization was good but one bad engineer was able to release something terrible with no oversight.
I think this is a more systemic problem even than oversight.
Why did this engineer seek to cover up his original mistake? It seems obvious that the engineer believed that revealing the mistake would have negative personal consequences for himself. Organizations that punish people for making mistakes encourage them to cover up mistakes.
It makes more sense to realize that if you have humans doing work then some percentage of the time they will make a mistake. It might be a very low percentage, but mistakes will happen, and this is because humans are fallible and not a reason to pick on the individual who happened to be unlucky.
You then design processes to minimize the risk of mistakes affecting production, and learn from mistakes when they do happen.
When you punish mistakes, even if not officially, then you cause individuals to subvert the entire quality system.