> if I run a web business I must contact all zip codes in > the USA to program the POS.
It's a lot worse than that. ZIP codes are set up by the USPS for its own convenience. They do not necessarily correspond to the borders of political or tax jurisdictions. The same is also true of the "city" field in your address. If you live in unincorporated county land, for example, your address will have the "city" of the nearby town where the post office that services you is located. So either one is useless as lookup for sales tax calculation.
I know you're joking. But alcohol actually did contribute a good deal to modern civilization. Beer and wine allowed man to not be perpetually sick, and occasionally dying, from waterborne illness. Rum made routine long-duration ocean voyages possible; leading to trans-oceanic trade and colonization and, eventually, to the British Empire.
Wow! That's a lot of work. There must not be any companies that do business wholly within your state. How could they with this unmanageable burden!
I'm not aware of any internet or mail-order retailers that restrict their patronage to a single state. Are you? Every business I've ever encountered that does business only within one state has been a simple brick-and-mortar store. And that's easy, even for a chain of stores. Any individual store exists in only a single location. So as part of your permitting or business license or whatever you pay a fee to someone from city hall or the county assessors office, they reference a map and the appropriate tax laws, and they give you a schedule of taxes with their office's seal and a "valid until" date on it. You program those tax rules into your POS system, and you're done. And it doesn't matter if someone buys something and takes it outside of the city, county, state, or even country. So long as you collected the appropriate tax, based on that B&M store's location, once the money changes hands and the merchandise is outside your doors, it's not your problem.
If a company has no presence in a state they receive no services from said state and have no representation in said state. That sounds like a good reason not to owe that state a single red cent.
Hmm... "taxation without representation", that sounds familiar. I wonder why?
That's a major reason that these laws are such a terrible idea. One thing many people forget in these cases is that the two obvious lookups, ZIP codes and the "city" field in your address, are set by the USPS for its own convenience; and do not necessarily correspond to the borders of any jurisdiction, tax or otherwise.. I actually used to live in a town that spanned parts of three ZIP codes and two counties. And because of the odd shapes of the borders and the location of the local post offices and their delivery routes, the USPS requested that we use the neighboring town in the "city" field of our mailing address, rather than the one in whose borders we actually lived. So a simple lookup by either field is worthless. Anyone trying to do these tax calculations would need to locate the exact physical location of every address for every order, and *then* determine what taxes apply where on what days, based on city, county, special tax district, and state boundaries.
Amazon could probably handle it. Smaller businesses, not so much. Startups? Forget it. These tax laws would be a nearly unreachable barrier of entry; closing off internet sales to pretty much anyone starting a new business.
Which was put there before they started collecting taxes. I'm betting if they have a do over on positioning their warehouses they would put them in low population states (aka just move it across the border to OK or NM).
Amazon used to do exactly that. The change to warehouses and distribution centers closer to population centers was a deliberate shift in their strategy so as to make one-day and same-day ordering feasible, as well as to introduce Prime Pantry.
For example: It used to be the case that, in the Bay Area, pretty much anything you'd order from Amazon would come out of their distribution center in Fernley, Nevada. That's about a six-hour drive up I-80, depending on traffic and the weather whilst going over the Sierras. That was fine for standard and two-day Prime shipping. But one-day could be disrupted by fairly minor delays; and same-day was pretty much a non-starter. And, of course, there was no sales tax charged back then which, I'm sure, was part of the reason for the Fernley location in the first place.
Now, they have multiple distribution centers in the Bay Area itself. The big one is out in Tracy (Okay... it's debatable if Tracy still counts as part of the "Bay Area", but whatever.), and there are smaller warehouses scattered throughout. That's in addition to the depots for their Prime Pantry trucks. So, now we pay sales tax on our Amazon stuff. The upshot though is that one-day and same-day shipping is available for the majority of Prime purchases. In many cases, the faster shipping is a free upgrade. And you can order your groceries from Amazon as well.
McLaren is a penny-ante outfit compared to a bank. And their IT infrastructure is different by orders of magnitude.
Banks pay IBM millions of dollars for hardware with guaranteed support and parts availability for 30-40 years following the purchase. The costs for those annual support contracts amount to millions more. And then there's the paid services for installation, migration, and integration when it does come time to replace their kit. What banks don't do, is run mission-critical applications on consumer laptops, no matter how new or old it is. If this story were about a bank running on a 20-year old s/390 or even a 30-year old s/370, no one would bat an eye. A 20-year old Compaq? I'd be scared to breathe on the thing, lest a part falls off and catches on fire.
The thing I don't get is how all of Wall Street, the investing community in general, and all of corporate America as a whole aren't on to his game. I'm basicaly penny-ante as an investor, and I know that Ichan is a steaming sack of shit, that every word that he spews from his noise hole is a lie and part of a scheme to manipulate the market and damage a company for his own short-term gain and to hell with anyone and everyone else, and that if he ever takes any interest in a company that company should do the opposite of anything Ichan suggests or desires. Obviously Tim Cook knows that too and so does Michael Dell. So why don't more people/companies/whatever ignore his BS and tell him to go pound sand?
You forgot to call Apple "beleaguered" and suggest that to Dell should buy them out so as to shut everything down and refund the money to the shareholders.
Unless you're legitimately talking about a level 2 network, it's the snarky asshat way of typing Mac, of course. Feign ignorance of the correct nomenclature in order to demonstrate that the product is beneath your notice, and all that. The same sort of people would type Lunix instead of Linux, WinDOS instead of Windows, claim that Windows phones still run on Win CE, call the Apple Watch an iWatch, and of course, type Micro$oft or Crapple.
Basically, it's juvenile name-calling and a sign that the poster is best ignored and/or down-modded.
So, right off the bat, it's already down to $833/month instead of $2,500. The's less than I'd be drawing monthly from social security, when I begin to do so; assuming my latest statement is accurate. Since this is proposed to be, in part, a social security replacement, that's already a loss. Granted, I'm not entirely confident that social security will still be there when it's time to begin drawing on it; so I've been investing under the assumption that it won't. But that's a concern with UBI as well.
But wait, I don't even get the whole $10,000/year. Your linked proposal says that taxes *DO* go up, such that I actually only get $5000/year. Granted, that's not nothing. It's a car payment, I guess, or a bit more to invest in my aforementioned retirement savings. But it's nothing to write home about. And if the government wants me to have an extra $416/month, it seems that a tax cut or credit would be an easier and more efficient way to let me have it. That way, the government doesn't need any administration or distribution costs at all.
Of course, the article glosses over implementation details like that.
Sure, I wouldn't mind an extra $2,500 every month. But is it truly an extra $2,500? If the taxes on my normal income will also go up by that $2,500, it's a wash. If inflation makes it so I don't have any real additional purchasing power, it's also a wash. So why add the additional level of complexity in those cases? And won't there be bureaucratic and administrative costs?
Show me the numbers. Show me where the money will come from such that I really will have an extra $30K take-home every year... that I actually benefit from and that won't be vacuumed away in taxes, bureaucracy, and inflation. Show me real, solid, numbers, and sure, I'll support the idea. But in my experience, things that sound too good to be true, usually are.
I don't really doubt the veracity of the article. But I wonder where these Hillary trolls are posting their astroturf? I sure don't see it on any of my feeds. I get a whole lot of Bernie's supporters trolling me (Presumably for free?) with their Hillary is Satan/Hitler spam than I see attacks on Bernie.
Don't get me wrong, I do plan to vote for the guy, at least in my state's primary. But his "Bros" are really starting to piss me off. And if he doesn't capture the nomination, I certainly won't sit at home and pout with a "I didn't get my way so the country can just BURN. Whaaaaa...) attitude in November like they say they will. Hillary may not be my ideal choice, but she's a damn sight better than Trump or Cruz.
Oh, the current generation of windows astroturfers are hilarious though. Their schtick seems to be that Gates & Co. are a little disruptive startup or otherwise a bit player. and a dislike of their products is purely an artifact of ignorance and lack of exposure. The only reason I would dislike windows/bing/xbox/whatever is that I've never been exposed to it. And if I would *JUST* try out all these amazing features (All of which, of course, are entirely new and innovative ideas and not at all in any way copies of Apple's, Google's, Linux's, or Sony's offerings... honest! You can trust us.), I'd become a convert.
Hey. Don't drag Mac users into this one. Historically, we were used to using type and creator codes in the file's resource fork, naming our files whatever we damned well pleased; and mocked the windows people for their 8.3 filenames every bit as much as the Unix guys did. So even pre-OS X, no *.* people here.
The only mainstream news channel that ever came close to replicating fox's level of bias, but reversed in favor of liberals, was MSNBC. And even they've toned it down and moved back towards the center (By firing Keith Olbermann, for example.) To find a left-leaning source these days equivalent to fox's slant, you have to leave network and cable television entirely and descent into the depths of internet loonydom such as Indymedia.
And yes, I do consider Indymedia to be every bit as biased and disreputable as I do fox.
There's a fairly famous case where some engineers at Apple were using "Sagan" as a codename for the project they were working on. This wasn't an official name for a released product. There was no marketing collateral, no press releases, no Steve Jobs keynote, no official public use of the name at all. It was just a purely internal codename like so many others. Carl Sagan somehow found out about said codename and promptly sued Apple, also writing "open letters" denouncing and making demands of the company. He lost, of course. But the product team changed their codename anyway... to "butt-head astronomer". Sagan sued again, alleging libel and defamation of character. Again, he lost.
Obviously I never knew the man personally. But he sure seems like a prick to me, to be slinging specious lawsuits around like that.
What I wish Facebook would release is a "no politics" filter. It's become really tedious to have half my feed consist of "Trump is Hitler" and "Hillary is Satan". I've been trying to train FB by hiding all of those and marking them as spam when it gives me the option. But it just doesn't seem to get the hint.
Yup. I remember the original notice. I hadn't realized it's been two years though.
It's not the price hike that bothers me so much though, after all inflation is a thing. But the shrinking content library is what may drive me away eventually. Every time I hop on Netflix to watch an episode of a show that used to be there but they dropped, notice that something has disappeared from my "watch later" list without my having actually watched it, or I see one of those "Netflix is dropping these show/movies. Better watch them before the end of the month" articles... THAT'S when I question whether or not it's worth it to keep my membership.
If the rumors (I think they're still just rumors at this point anyway.) about who provided the tool are true though, the "third party" is a company operating out of Israel. So the DMCA would not apply to the tool developers. Nice and neat little way for the FBI to circumvent any applicable US laws, courts, and due process, that. And certainly not a channel they'd close down by enforcing any laws that they couldn't enforce anyway, or getting the Israeli government to enforce whatever anti-piracy laws they might have there.
At the end of the day though, bug bounty or no, the question is white hat or black hat? Do you aspire to be a legitimate security researcher? Or do you want to be part of the criminal underground or a thug for an oppressive government? Do you have a sense of ethics and integrity?
Consider also that Apple has, on a number of documented occasions, hired people who've discovered and reported vulnerabilities to improve the very products reported on; as have other tech companies. Alternately, finding and responsibly reporting a major exploit is also a nice line on the resume even if you never work for the reportee. And while black hat hackers are sometimes rehabilitated, that's a much rarer thing.
A big problem is also that since it's so hard to unseat incumbent congress critters... senators or representatives... that viable candidates often don't bother running for the office until said incumbent retires. (Or, sometimes, is forced out by a scandal.) Nancy Pelosi, for example, is disliked by a significant portion of the voters here in her district. She is viewed as a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) who is culpable for cooperating with george bush and his lot across the board, especially for allowing the Iraq war to continue when she could have stopped it by withholding funding the day she became speaker, and generally failing to represent the wishes and interests of her district. But the lineup that runs against her every other year may as well have just walked out of a looney tunes cartoon. So people hole their nose and vote for her anyway because she's still better than the alternative. The same goes for Feinstein... I just used Pelosi as an example because, living in her district, I see a lot of the crazy that runs against her moreso than I do in the senate races.
More than armed guards... she also bullied her war through the SF Sheriff's Department to get herself a (rare and very seldom granted) concealed carry permit. Google says she eventually let it lapse and is no longer armed herself. But yeah... a loathsome woman, raging hypocrite, and practically the dictionary definition of a DINO.
Were those "truck drivers" from the map all long-haul big rig drivers? Or did it include the urban divers working for the likes of UPS, FedEx, Cintas, Iron Mountain, and so on? There's a significant non-driving aspect to all of the latter jobs that requires a human being even if the truck itself is self-driving.
Also, I'd be remiss in not pointing out that at one point 90% of the US population worked in agriculture. Obviously, that's not the case anymore. And our precursors seem to have managed the loss of those jobs and transition to new economic models without the US turning into a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled over by Tina Turner. So I don't think we need to worry about the sky falling just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
> if I run a web business I must contact all zip codes in
> the USA to program the POS.
It's a lot worse than that. ZIP codes are set up by the USPS for its own convenience. They do not necessarily correspond to the borders of political or tax jurisdictions. The same is also true of the "city" field in your address. If you live in unincorporated county land, for example, your address will have the "city" of the nearby town where the post office that services you is located. So either one is useless as lookup for sales tax calculation.
I know you're joking. But alcohol actually did contribute a good deal to modern civilization. Beer and wine allowed man to not be perpetually sick, and occasionally dying, from waterborne illness. Rum made routine long-duration ocean voyages possible; leading to trans-oceanic trade and colonization and, eventually, to the British Empire.
I'm not aware of any internet or mail-order retailers that restrict their patronage to a single state. Are you? Every business I've ever encountered that does business only within one state has been a simple brick-and-mortar store. And that's easy, even for a chain of stores. Any individual store exists in only a single location. So as part of your permitting or business license or whatever you pay a fee to someone from city hall or the county assessors office, they reference a map and the appropriate tax laws, and they give you a schedule of taxes with their office's seal and a "valid until" date on it. You program those tax rules into your POS system, and you're done. And it doesn't matter if someone buys something and takes it outside of the city, county, state, or even country. So long as you collected the appropriate tax, based on that B&M store's location, once the money changes hands and the merchandise is outside your doors, it's not your problem.
If a company has no presence in a state they receive no services from said state and have no representation in said state. That sounds like a good reason not to owe that state a single red cent.
Hmm... "taxation without representation", that sounds familiar. I wonder why?
That's a major reason that these laws are such a terrible idea. One thing many people forget in these cases is that the two obvious lookups, ZIP codes and the "city" field in your address, are set by the USPS for its own convenience; and do not necessarily correspond to the borders of any jurisdiction, tax or otherwise.. I actually used to live in a town that spanned parts of three ZIP codes and two counties. And because of the odd shapes of the borders and the location of the local post offices and their delivery routes, the USPS requested that we use the neighboring town in the "city" field of our mailing address, rather than the one in whose borders we actually lived. So a simple lookup by either field is worthless. Anyone trying to do these tax calculations would need to locate the exact physical location of every address for every order, and *then* determine what taxes apply where on what days, based on city, county, special tax district, and state boundaries.
Amazon could probably handle it. Smaller businesses, not so much. Startups? Forget it. These tax laws would be a nearly unreachable barrier of entry; closing off internet sales to pretty much anyone starting a new business.
Amazon used to do exactly that. The change to warehouses and distribution centers closer to population centers was a deliberate shift in their strategy so as to make one-day and same-day ordering feasible, as well as to introduce Prime Pantry.
For example: It used to be the case that, in the Bay Area, pretty much anything you'd order from Amazon would come out of their distribution center in Fernley, Nevada. That's about a six-hour drive up I-80, depending on traffic and the weather whilst going over the Sierras. That was fine for standard and two-day Prime shipping. But one-day could be disrupted by fairly minor delays; and same-day was pretty much a non-starter. And, of course, there was no sales tax charged back then which, I'm sure, was part of the reason for the Fernley location in the first place.
Now, they have multiple distribution centers in the Bay Area itself. The big one is out in Tracy (Okay... it's debatable if Tracy still counts as part of the "Bay Area", but whatever.), and there are smaller warehouses scattered throughout. That's in addition to the depots for their Prime Pantry trucks. So, now we pay sales tax on our Amazon stuff. The upshot though is that one-day and same-day shipping is available for the majority of Prime purchases. In many cases, the faster shipping is a free upgrade. And you can order your groceries from Amazon as well.
McLaren is a penny-ante outfit compared to a bank. And their IT infrastructure is different by orders of magnitude.
Banks pay IBM millions of dollars for hardware with guaranteed support and parts availability for 30-40 years following the purchase. The costs for those annual support contracts amount to millions more. And then there's the paid services for installation, migration, and integration when it does come time to replace their kit. What banks don't do, is run mission-critical applications on consumer laptops, no matter how new or old it is. If this story were about a bank running on a 20-year old s/390 or even a 30-year old s/370, no one would bat an eye. A 20-year old Compaq? I'd be scared to breathe on the thing, lest a part falls off and catches on fire.
The thing I don't get is how all of Wall Street, the investing community in general, and all of corporate America as a whole aren't on to his game. I'm basicaly penny-ante as an investor, and I know that Ichan is a steaming sack of shit, that every word that he spews from his noise hole is a lie and part of a scheme to manipulate the market and damage a company for his own short-term gain and to hell with anyone and everyone else, and that if he ever takes any interest in a company that company should do the opposite of anything Ichan suggests or desires. Obviously Tim Cook knows that too and so does Michael Dell. So why don't more people/companies/whatever ignore his BS and tell him to go pound sand?
You forgot to call Apple "beleaguered" and suggest that to Dell should buy them out so as to shut everything down and refund the money to the shareholders.
Unless you're legitimately talking about a level 2 network, it's the snarky asshat way of typing Mac, of course. Feign ignorance of the correct nomenclature in order to demonstrate that the product is beneath your notice, and all that. The same sort of people would type Lunix instead of Linux, WinDOS instead of Windows, claim that Windows phones still run on Win CE, call the Apple Watch an iWatch, and of course, type Micro$oft or Crapple.
Basically, it's juvenile name-calling and a sign that the poster is best ignored and/or down-modded.
So, right off the bat, it's already down to $833/month instead of $2,500. The's less than I'd be drawing monthly from social security, when I begin to do so; assuming my latest statement is accurate. Since this is proposed to be, in part, a social security replacement, that's already a loss. Granted, I'm not entirely confident that social security will still be there when it's time to begin drawing on it; so I've been investing under the assumption that it won't. But that's a concern with UBI as well.
But wait, I don't even get the whole $10,000/year. Your linked proposal says that taxes *DO* go up, such that I actually only get $5000/year. Granted, that's not nothing. It's a car payment, I guess, or a bit more to invest in my aforementioned retirement savings. But it's nothing to write home about. And if the government wants me to have an extra $416/month, it seems that a tax cut or credit would be an easier and more efficient way to let me have it. That way, the government doesn't need any administration or distribution costs at all.
Of course, the article glosses over implementation details like that.
Sure, I wouldn't mind an extra $2,500 every month. But is it truly an extra $2,500? If the taxes on my normal income will also go up by that $2,500, it's a wash. If inflation makes it so I don't have any real additional purchasing power, it's also a wash. So why add the additional level of complexity in those cases? And won't there be bureaucratic and administrative costs?
Show me the numbers. Show me where the money will come from such that I really will have an extra $30K take-home every year... that I actually benefit from and that won't be vacuumed away in taxes, bureaucracy, and inflation. Show me real, solid, numbers, and sure, I'll support the idea. But in my experience, things that sound too good to be true, usually are.
I don't really doubt the veracity of the article. But I wonder where these Hillary trolls are posting their astroturf? I sure don't see it on any of my feeds. I get a whole lot of Bernie's supporters trolling me (Presumably for free?) with their Hillary is Satan/Hitler spam than I see attacks on Bernie.
Don't get me wrong, I do plan to vote for the guy, at least in my state's primary. But his "Bros" are really starting to piss me off. And if he doesn't capture the nomination, I certainly won't sit at home and pout with a "I didn't get my way so the country can just BURN. Whaaaaa...) attitude in November like they say they will. Hillary may not be my ideal choice, but she's a damn sight better than Trump or Cruz.
Oh, the current generation of windows astroturfers are hilarious though. Their schtick seems to be that Gates & Co. are a little disruptive startup or otherwise a bit player. and a dislike of their products is purely an artifact of ignorance and lack of exposure. The only reason I would dislike windows/bing/xbox/whatever is that I've never been exposed to it. And if I would *JUST* try out all these amazing features (All of which, of course, are entirely new and innovative ideas and not at all in any way copies of Apple's, Google's, Linux's, or Sony's offerings... honest! You can trust us.), I'd become a convert.
Hey. Don't drag Mac users into this one. Historically, we were used to using type and creator codes in the file's resource fork, naming our files whatever we damned well pleased; and mocked the windows people for their 8.3 filenames every bit as much as the Unix guys did. So even pre-OS X, no *.* people here.
Oh, bullocks.
The only mainstream news channel that ever came close to replicating fox's level of bias, but reversed in favor of liberals, was MSNBC. And even they've toned it down and moved back towards the center (By firing Keith Olbermann, for example.) To find a left-leaning source these days equivalent to fox's slant, you have to leave network and cable television entirely and descent into the depths of internet loonydom such as Indymedia.
And yes, I do consider Indymedia to be every bit as biased and disreputable as I do fox.
There's a fairly famous case where some engineers at Apple were using "Sagan" as a codename for the project they were working on. This wasn't an official name for a released product. There was no marketing collateral, no press releases, no Steve Jobs keynote, no official public use of the name at all. It was just a purely internal codename like so many others. Carl Sagan somehow found out about said codename and promptly sued Apple, also writing "open letters" denouncing and making demands of the company. He lost, of course. But the product team changed their codename anyway... to "butt-head astronomer". Sagan sued again, alleging libel and defamation of character. Again, he lost.
Obviously I never knew the man personally. But he sure seems like a prick to me, to be slinging specious lawsuits around like that.
Not everyone would agree on which evil is lesser:
"if Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons"
What I wish Facebook would release is a "no politics" filter. It's become really tedious to have half my feed consist of "Trump is Hitler" and "Hillary is Satan". I've been trying to train FB by hiding all of those and marking them as spam when it gives me the option. But it just doesn't seem to get the hint.
Yup. I remember the original notice. I hadn't realized it's been two years though.
It's not the price hike that bothers me so much though, after all inflation is a thing. But the shrinking content library is what may drive me away eventually. Every time I hop on Netflix to watch an episode of a show that used to be there but they dropped, notice that something has disappeared from my "watch later" list without my having actually watched it, or I see one of those "Netflix is dropping these show/movies. Better watch them before the end of the month" articles... THAT'S when I question whether or not it's worth it to keep my membership.
If the rumors (I think they're still just rumors at this point anyway.) about who provided the tool are true though, the "third party" is a company operating out of Israel. So the DMCA would not apply to the tool developers. Nice and neat little way for the FBI to circumvent any applicable US laws, courts, and due process, that. And certainly not a channel they'd close down by enforcing any laws that they couldn't enforce anyway, or getting the Israeli government to enforce whatever anti-piracy laws they might have there.
At the end of the day though, bug bounty or no, the question is white hat or black hat? Do you aspire to be a legitimate security researcher? Or do you want to be part of the criminal underground or a thug for an oppressive government? Do you have a sense of ethics and integrity?
Consider also that Apple has, on a number of documented occasions, hired people who've discovered and reported vulnerabilities to improve the very products reported on; as have other tech companies. Alternately, finding and responsibly reporting a major exploit is also a nice line on the resume even if you never work for the reportee. And while black hat hackers are sometimes rehabilitated, that's a much rarer thing.
A big problem is also that since it's so hard to unseat incumbent congress critters... senators or representatives... that viable candidates often don't bother running for the office until said incumbent retires. (Or, sometimes, is forced out by a scandal.) Nancy Pelosi, for example, is disliked by a significant portion of the voters here in her district. She is viewed as a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) who is culpable for cooperating with george bush and his lot across the board, especially for allowing the Iraq war to continue when she could have stopped it by withholding funding the day she became speaker, and generally failing to represent the wishes and interests of her district. But the lineup that runs against her every other year may as well have just walked out of a looney tunes cartoon. So people hole their nose and vote for her anyway because she's still better than the alternative. The same goes for Feinstein... I just used Pelosi as an example because, living in her district, I see a lot of the crazy that runs against her moreso than I do in the senate races.
More than armed guards... she also bullied her war through the SF Sheriff's Department to get herself a (rare and very seldom granted) concealed carry permit. Google says she eventually let it lapse and is no longer armed herself. But yeah... a loathsome woman, raging hypocrite, and practically the dictionary definition of a DINO.
Were those "truck drivers" from the map all long-haul big rig drivers? Or did it include the urban divers working for the likes of UPS, FedEx, Cintas, Iron Mountain, and so on? There's a significant non-driving aspect to all of the latter jobs that requires a human being even if the truck itself is self-driving.
Also, I'd be remiss in not pointing out that at one point 90% of the US population worked in agriculture. Obviously, that's not the case anymore. And our precursors seem to have managed the loss of those jobs and transition to new economic models without the US turning into a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled over by Tina Turner. So I don't think we need to worry about the sky falling just yet.