Well, that is the other option for dating. In the process of trying to have sex with random girls sometimes you discover that you really like one of them and she really likes you and that's how one generally obtains a GF.
Please elaborate! Here on Earth, getting a girlfriend involves first dating women. Earth women generally won't directly become girlfriends with strangers. And they absolutely will not become romantically involved with anyone they have a previous non-romatic relationship with (friends, co-workers, whatever).
At some point though, the rich won't need money from the masses. They will be able to just directly order their robo-factories to directly build their yachts and mega-mansions, using robo-manufactured components built from robo-harvested raw materials. If they don't personally own robo-companies that have what they need, they can just trade with other 1%ers who do own the right robo-resources.
They probably will need a few lesser humans (at least in the beginning) to fill in the gaps that robots can't (yet) do. But that will just be an issue of enticing the best of the best non-1%ers with the opportunity to live in the servants' wing of their robo-built mansion and eat the leftovers of their robo-harvested food.
Right now they only need money from the masses so they can use that money to employee the masses. That dependancy goes away of you already own vast armies of robots that serve you for free.
Yeah but in Niven's books, a lot of the organs came from traffic violations (which had been bumped up to capital of offenses to keep the organ banks full).
Self driving cars reduce traffic violations too! So fewer capital crimes to keep our organ banks full as well!
Ever felt guilty about not doing anything on a lazy Sunday
Um, no? On the rare occasions that I get a lazy Sunday where I don't have to work and I don't have a bunch of chores back-logged from not being able to do them when I was working, the thoughts I usually have are "why can't every day be like this?" and "Damn, it's over already?"
It makes a cute quote, but it's not really the type of activity that makes work suck. What I "love doing" is not dealing with deadlines, stress, or the responsibilities of other people depending on my work.
Take away those pressures and even stuff like digging holes or cleaning is fun. Because as soon as it stops being fun you move on to something else.
So really the only way to "love what I'm doing" is to not "have to" do it, and be able to stop doing it and move on to something else whenever I want. Which describes no job ever, pretty much by definition.
There is clearly something wrong with that article's math.
There are about 300,000,000 Americans, out of about 7 billion people on Earth. Which means Americans are over 4% of the world's population. So even if the poorest American is richer than the richest non-American (obviously false) you would still have to be in the top 25% of Americans to be in the world's top 1%. So do you honestly think $33k per year puts you in the top quartile of Americans?
Allow a business to invest all its money in itself and it's employees.
Any money they invest in themselves (as capital expenditure or R&D) or employees is already not taxed, since those are expenses. Only profits (going either to shareholders or sitting in reserve), after all the expenses are paid, get taxed.
You don't typically evaporate water to desalinate. You just pump it through reverse osmosis filters. Much less energy (but still I doubt it's practical to replace California's rain that way).
Following this logic, any device capable of producing constant force will go over-unity at some speed. So rockets, jet engines, propellers, wheels, anything we've ever built, is impossible.
As a frequent business traveler, I have to ask: where do I move my house to? The reason I have to fly for work is because my customers are scattered around the world, I'm not flying to any one particular place. There is no one place on Earth that has enough customers to keep me employed full-time throughout the year.
And as work gets more and more specialized, I think this will increasingly become the norm.
Something is wrong with your argument, as it would apply to any constant-force producing device, like say a jet engine producing constant thrust. And obviously you can attach a 1.8 micro newton jet engine to a wheel without violating the laws of physics.
(It's a little harder to see how you generate new jet fuel by spinning a wheel, but in principle energy is energy)
Ok super curious now. I'm guessing "honk" means something else in your dialect? I tried the usual "British English to American English" searches and got nothing. In American English, "Honk" is an onomatopoeia of the sound car horns make (comparing them to the sound geese make). "To honk" is the verbing of that word. One honks a horn by pushing the center of the steering wheel causing the car horn to make the honk sound. This is done to alert other drivers, get their attention, or express road rage.
I figured they might mean entrances and lobbies of high-rise type buildings where everyone enters the same door and goes to their unit via internal hallways. I thought I was poking fun at the writer who assumed that (nearly) all the readers lived in such buildings, as I have only seen such things in movies and TV shows (usually NYC based). I don't live in an apartment at all now, and the ones I did live in in my youth were all small buildings with each unit having an individual external door, and I was trying to imagine the obsurd idea of hundred of cams sitting outside on the walkway, each pointed at one renter's private doorway. But as the other replies to me have pointed out, apartment complexes and even detached house neighborhoods may well have privately owned cams cooperating voluntarily with the police.
Wow, no, I was not aware of programs like that. I have no trouble imagining people signing up their privately owned cams in this depressing day and age.
Ah, I forgot about parking lots and other common areas like the pool, and maybe entrances gates if the apartment is in a gated complex.
Also didn't really realize wifi with default connection to the Internet is now the standard way to connect cams (but it's obvious in hindsight that that's what cheap consumer stuff uses these days).
The summary says there's a public camera outside my apartment. Really? That's weird, I don't even live in an apartment. But seriously, it seems a strange thing to say. Why would most apartments have public cameras outside? I'm not even sure what that means? 'Public' as in government funded? (Then wouldn't the police have direct access anyway?) Or are they just meaning publicly accessible, as in webcam available on the Internet? But then, who is installing all these cameras outside everyone's apartments? Seems pretty creepy, or are these outward facing cameras from everyone's apartment? But how many people would install such cameras and make them public (certainly not enough to assume everyone has one outside their apartment)? I could see maybe high-rise type apartments having a cam at the entrance, but that's a pretty rare type of apartment to live in, and I still would think the feed would be private, not on the internet.
The "legal process of immigration" is currently "no Mexicans (or anyone from south of Mexico)".
Seriously, there is no visa category that your "average Jose" could even apply for.
The issue here is there is no option less than 40 hours per week that will put a roof over your head. And working "only" 40 hours is increasingly a pipe dream. 40 hours already feels way too long to me, it dominates the majority of my waking hours. Spending all that time with sore feet, aching back, pain in my eyes, unable to get comfortable, unable to hug my wife or son, surrounded by strange people I don't really like. That's no way to spend the majority of one's existence.
But anything less is strictly fast food or retail work at minimum wage, which won't even pay for rent.
even many moderate muslims who wouldn't dream of stooping to violence themselves would vote for sharia law if it was brought to a vote.
So why doesn't Indonesia have Sharia law yet? The country is 80% Muslim yet the democratically elected party in power cracks down as hard as it can on Islamic terrorists. The party that lost the election also cracks down as hard as it can on Islamic terrorist (when they were in power). The 2 biggest parties seem to compete on who cracks down on Islamic terrorists the most.
The party that runs on a platform of Sharia law? They can't get enough votes to get a single representative in parliament. In an 80% Muslim country.
it seems to me that if you actually give Muslims a chance to vote, they don't seem to favor hard-line fundamentalism. It's only if you screw around with their voting (or have no voting at all) that Islamic fundamentalism takes hold. And even then, the hard-liners have to constantly, heavily enforce their rules and literally beat the populous into submission.
If robots replace my job tomorrow, I'll get a job to maintain robots.
I always love this line. We are positing a future where robots are replacing humans across the board, from Doctors to Insurance Salesmen. Yet Robot Repair is going to be totally safe. Cause analyzing totally logical, deterministic machinery to determine what components of its fully documented system are out of spec is totally a job that's safe from being automated.
According to the quran itself, that is a fundamentally contradictory and inconsistent position to being a "good" muslim.
But that's the same Koran that they are ignorant of, reinterpreting, or ignoring anyway. They can just as easily be ignorant of, reinterpret, or ignore those parts of the Koran too.
I don't see why the strict "Koranic Literalists" should get to define Islam when clearly most Muslims are not literalists (even if they think they are). Biblical Literalists are a small, very disliked minority of Christianity, so why would Islam be different?
They believe the Koran is good, but most Muslims disagree with the idea of torturing or killing people. They might "understand" a non-literal interpretation, they might rationalize that it only applies in a narrow historical context, they might just be ignorant of the actual passages in in. JUST LIKE CHRISTIANS, they believe what they want to believe anyway; which for most ends up being a cherry-picked, metaphorical, has-to-be-understood-in-context "understanding" that their holy text is all about peace and brotherhood.
If the self-identified Muslims want to believe that God expects them to be peaceful and loving, why the hell would you want to tell them they're wrong?
Umm, all those publicly traded companies need the investment money to continue doing business. If the stock market starts to shrink, that means the publicly traded companies have less money to operate on.
Except, the stock market doesn't really provide any money to the company, except during an IPO. Publicly traded companies almost never issue new stock (because it pisses off existing stock holders when their holdings are diluted). When you buy non-IPO stock on Wall Street, the money you spend goes to the previous stock holder, not to the actual company you are "investing" in.
So any mature company that's already profitable should be able to ignore Wall Street entirely and just continue doing what it did before. But the problem is, they all have to do it or the economy will shrink and they'll have less money coming in. Which makes it kind of a prisoners' dilemma where companies don't want to be left trying to operate as "normal" when everyone else cuts back and the economy tanks. So they preemptively cut back making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Well, that is the other option for dating. In the process of trying to have sex with random girls sometimes you discover that you really like one of them and she really likes you and that's how one generally obtains a GF.
Please elaborate! Here on Earth, getting a girlfriend involves first dating women. Earth women generally won't directly become girlfriends with strangers. And they absolutely will not become romantically involved with anyone they have a previous non-romatic relationship with (friends, co-workers, whatever).
Um, how do you get a GF to have sex with? Generally you start by going out on dates with women.
That is kind of the whole point of dating.
At some point though, the rich won't need money from the masses. They will be able to just directly order their robo-factories to directly build their yachts and mega-mansions, using robo-manufactured components built from robo-harvested raw materials. If they don't personally own robo-companies that have what they need, they can just trade with other 1%ers who do own the right robo-resources.
They probably will need a few lesser humans (at least in the beginning) to fill in the gaps that robots can't (yet) do. But that will just be an issue of enticing the best of the best non-1%ers with the opportunity to live in the servants' wing of their robo-built mansion and eat the leftovers of their robo-harvested food.
Right now they only need money from the masses so they can use that money to employee the masses. That dependancy goes away of you already own vast armies of robots that serve you for free.
Yeah but in Niven's books, a lot of the organs came from traffic violations (which had been bumped up to capital of offenses to keep the organ banks full).
Self driving cars reduce traffic violations too! So fewer capital crimes to keep our organ banks full as well!
Ever felt guilty about not doing anything on a lazy Sunday
Um, no? On the rare occasions that I get a lazy Sunday where I don't have to work and I don't have a bunch of chores back-logged from not being able to do them when I was working, the thoughts I usually have are "why can't every day be like this?" and "Damn, it's over already?"
It makes a cute quote, but it's not really the type of activity that makes work suck. What I "love doing" is not dealing with deadlines, stress, or the responsibilities of other people depending on my work.
Take away those pressures and even stuff like digging holes or cleaning is fun. Because as soon as it stops being fun you move on to something else.
So really the only way to "love what I'm doing" is to not "have to" do it, and be able to stop doing it and move on to something else whenever I want. Which describes no job ever, pretty much by definition.
There is clearly something wrong with that article's math. There are about 300,000,000 Americans, out of about 7 billion people on Earth. Which means Americans are over 4% of the world's population. So even if the poorest American is richer than the richest non-American (obviously false) you would still have to be in the top 25% of Americans to be in the world's top 1%. So do you honestly think $33k per year puts you in the top quartile of Americans?
Allow a business to invest all its money in itself and it's employees.
Any money they invest in themselves (as capital expenditure or R&D) or employees is already not taxed, since those are expenses. Only profits (going either to shareholders or sitting in reserve), after all the expenses are paid, get taxed.
To evaporate 1 kg of water...
You don't typically evaporate water to desalinate. You just pump it through reverse osmosis filters. Much less energy (but still I doubt it's practical to replace California's rain that way).
Following this logic, any device capable of producing constant force will go over-unity at some speed. So rockets, jet engines, propellers, wheels, anything we've ever built, is impossible.
As a frequent business traveler, I have to ask: where do I move my house to? The reason I have to fly for work is because my customers are scattered around the world, I'm not flying to any one particular place. There is no one place on Earth that has enough customers to keep me employed full-time throughout the year. And as work gets more and more specialized, I think this will increasingly become the norm.
Something is wrong with your argument, as it would apply to any constant-force producing device, like say a jet engine producing constant thrust. And obviously you can attach a 1.8 micro newton jet engine to a wheel without violating the laws of physics. (It's a little harder to see how you generate new jet fuel by spinning a wheel, but in principle energy is energy)
Ok super curious now. I'm guessing "honk" means something else in your dialect? I tried the usual "British English to American English" searches and got nothing.
In American English, "Honk" is an onomatopoeia of the sound car horns make (comparing them to the sound geese make). "To honk" is the verbing of that word. One honks a horn by pushing the center of the steering wheel causing the car horn to make the honk sound. This is done to alert other drivers, get their attention, or express road rage.
I figured they might mean entrances and lobbies of high-rise type buildings where everyone enters the same door and goes to their unit via internal hallways.
I thought I was poking fun at the writer who assumed that (nearly) all the readers lived in such buildings, as I have only seen such things in movies and TV shows (usually NYC based). I don't live in an apartment at all now, and the ones I did live in in my youth were all small buildings with each unit having an individual external door, and I was trying to imagine the obsurd idea of hundred of cams sitting outside on the walkway, each pointed at one renter's private doorway.
But as the other replies to me have pointed out, apartment complexes and even detached house neighborhoods may well have privately owned cams cooperating voluntarily with the police.
Wow, no, I was not aware of programs like that. I have no trouble imagining people signing up their privately owned cams in this depressing day and age.
Ah, I forgot about parking lots and other common areas like the pool, and maybe entrances gates if the apartment is in a gated complex. Also didn't really realize wifi with default connection to the Internet is now the standard way to connect cams (but it's obvious in hindsight that that's what cheap consumer stuff uses these days).
The summary says there's a public camera outside my apartment. Really? That's weird, I don't even live in an apartment.
But seriously, it seems a strange thing to say. Why would most apartments have public cameras outside? I'm not even sure what that means? 'Public' as in government funded? (Then wouldn't the police have direct access anyway?) Or are they just meaning publicly accessible, as in webcam available on the Internet? But then, who is installing all these cameras outside everyone's apartments? Seems pretty creepy, or are these outward facing cameras from everyone's apartment? But how many people would install such cameras and make them public (certainly not enough to assume everyone has one outside their apartment)?
I could see maybe high-rise type apartments having a cam at the entrance, but that's a pretty rare type of apartment to live in, and I still would think the feed would be private, not on the internet.
The "legal process of immigration" is currently "no Mexicans (or anyone from south of Mexico)". Seriously, there is no visa category that your "average Jose" could even apply for.
The issue here is there is no option less than 40 hours per week that will put a roof over your head. And working "only" 40 hours is increasingly a pipe dream. 40 hours already feels way too long to me, it dominates the majority of my waking hours. Spending all that time with sore feet, aching back, pain in my eyes, unable to get comfortable, unable to hug my wife or son, surrounded by strange people I don't really like. That's no way to spend the majority of one's existence.
But anything less is strictly fast food or retail work at minimum wage, which won't even pay for rent.
So why doesn't Indonesia have Sharia law yet? The country is 80% Muslim yet the democratically elected party in power cracks down as hard as it can on Islamic terrorists. The party that lost the election also cracks down as hard as it can on Islamic terrorist (when they were in power). The 2 biggest parties seem to compete on who cracks down on Islamic terrorists the most.
The party that runs on a platform of Sharia law? They can't get enough votes to get a single representative in parliament. In an 80% Muslim country.
it seems to me that if you actually give Muslims a chance to vote, they don't seem to favor hard-line fundamentalism. It's only if you screw around with their voting (or have no voting at all) that Islamic fundamentalism takes hold. And even then, the hard-liners have to constantly, heavily enforce their rules and literally beat the populous into submission.
If robots replace my job tomorrow, I'll get a job to maintain robots.
I always love this line. We are positing a future where robots are replacing humans across the board, from Doctors to Insurance Salesmen. Yet Robot Repair is going to be totally safe. Cause analyzing totally logical, deterministic machinery to determine what components of its fully documented system are out of spec is totally a job that's safe from being automated.
According to the quran itself, that is a fundamentally contradictory and inconsistent position to being a "good" muslim.
But that's the same Koran that they are ignorant of, reinterpreting, or ignoring anyway. They can just as easily be ignorant of, reinterpret, or ignore those parts of the Koran too.
I don't see why the strict "Koranic Literalists" should get to define Islam when clearly most Muslims are not literalists (even if they think they are). Biblical Literalists are a small, very disliked minority of Christianity, so why would Islam be different?
They believe the Koran is good, but most Muslims disagree with the idea of torturing or killing people. They might "understand" a non-literal interpretation, they might rationalize that it only applies in a narrow historical context, they might just be ignorant of the actual passages in in. JUST LIKE CHRISTIANS, they believe what they want to believe anyway; which for most ends up being a cherry-picked, metaphorical, has-to-be-understood-in-context "understanding" that their holy text is all about peace and brotherhood.
If the self-identified Muslims want to believe that God expects them to be peaceful and loving, why the hell would you want to tell them they're wrong?
Umm, all those publicly traded companies need the investment money to continue doing business. If the stock market starts to shrink, that means the publicly traded companies have less money to operate on.
Except, the stock market doesn't really provide any money to the company, except during an IPO. Publicly traded companies almost never issue new stock (because it pisses off existing stock holders when their holdings are diluted). When you buy non-IPO stock on Wall Street, the money you spend goes to the previous stock holder, not to the actual company you are "investing" in.
So any mature company that's already profitable should be able to ignore Wall Street entirely and just continue doing what it did before. But the problem is, they all have to do it or the economy will shrink and they'll have less money coming in. Which makes it kind of a prisoners' dilemma where companies don't want to be left trying to operate as "normal" when everyone else cuts back and the economy tanks. So they preemptively cut back making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.