The common man will have a job doing these, because the common man is paying for them. It has always worked out that way.
Let's say we have a hundred hairdressers and Joe Automated Factory Owner (who kicked out his employees when he automated the factory, which is why they became hairdressers). The hairdressers can care for each other's hair all they want, but only Joe can actually pay them. And Joe only has one head and a hundred hairdressers competing for it, so one lucky hairdresser gets to work for a sandwich per day (as long as he also calls Joe "sir") and the rest starve. Because, now matter how many combovers they might give for one another, the only one who can pay them with something valuable is Joe and Joe only needs one hairdresser - and even that is not really an important need, so even that poor bastard lives in constant fear and must obey Joe's every whim or starve.
That is the problem. An automated factory only connects to the rest of the economy through its owner(s), not workers (since it doesn't have any). This creates a chokepoint for how fast the wealth it produces can enter the rest of the economy. And if all productive capability is behind such chokepoints, then whoever owns the factories become filthy rich and the rest become poor to the point of starving.
Ultimately, most people end up working to provide whatever all of us need. The various economic systems are just a way to decide who does what - but absence some huge government incentive not to work, most people will work at something, because we all want stuff and the stuff we want must come from somewhere.
It comes from automated factories - that was the whole premise of this discussion. The factory doesn't have workers since it doesn't need any, so where will the people work?
Or to put it another way: what value can you provide the factory owner in exchange of some of the goods his automated factory produces? And how essential is that value - in other words, how precarious will your position be?
Automation just moves us farther up the hierarchy of needs.
It does, those who own it. The rest are left fighting for table scraps as usual - except their position will be far worse than before, since they lack what little power they had, since they are no longer needed to keep factories working.
I don't think we're there yet - not in my lifetime - but I do think it's the endpoint. When out worst problem is boredom, we'll all be somehow involved in creating entertaining challenges for one another.
Most economists would agree with you on that (not sure if that in geek circles is taken as a compliment or not, but given as one, we tend to be far too dismissive of other expertise than our own)
It's hard to not be dismissive of economists when their supposed expertise seems to be good for nothing but having the economy limp from one crisis to another.
probably not as much as you're discriminating against atheists by implying they eat differently to non-atheists
Well of course they do. Debauchery is hard work; constant drug-fueled orgies require a strict diet and exercise regimen to keep up with. The latter is why atheists wear special shoes, which apparently have a tendency to go missing on mail, which is probably what the grandparent was referring to.
Problem here is that the Evangelicals have a plan for the Jews. Many of them follow an interpretation of revelations which says that God's plan includes the Jews taking back Israel, and it playing an important role in "the end times" as they like to call it.
So, does that officially make Evangelicals evil cultists? I mean, trying to get an end-of-the-world prophecy started is usually the domain of villains...
Progeny is a privilege, not a right. This is not my doing, nor is it anything that we could change, even if we wanted to, it is a natural law.
Gravity is a natural law. Social Darwinism is not. It's a recent and bad idea.
If they cant feed their children (or themselves), then they die.
True, but irrelevant, because no one who lives now can "feed themselves" without help from others, with the possible exception of some members of hunter-gatherer tribes. The fact is, humans are a social species, and how that society is arranged and resources distributed is not a "natural law" but simply a function of culture.
Its simpler and far less cruel if they don't have the kids in the first place, but the choice is theirs.
It would be even simpler and less cruel if people wanting to demonstrate their toughness would do so through ascetism or something rather than sociopathy. No one's impressed by you mortificating someone else's flesh, you weakling, except perhaps other weaklings.
You're going to piss off a whole lot of Scandinavians. They view themselves as Capitalist because private enterprise rules their economy still.
Well, no. Even a scandinavian who views himself as a hard-core capitalist isn't going to get "pissed off" at the description, simply because the word "socialist" is not an insult in Scandinavia. It's a political view along all others, who's merits and shortcomings can be discussed between rational adults without anyone getting emotionally distraught.
And that is why Scandinavia has succesfully combined the good sides of both socialism and capitalism. There's a lesson in that.
You're mistaking excellent social services as Socialism, when the two are not related at all.
The technical term is "welfare state". And of course it is related to socialism, specifically to social democracy. Or did you perhaps think that the Scandinavian owning class is such a higher breed than your own as to overcome greed by itself, without being forced to?
At some point the 'haves' need the 'have nots' to have money. Filthy rich people don't continue to get filthy rich off of one another.
But if the haves don't need the have nots for a workforce, what do they care? The only purpose of money is to convince someone to do something for you; if you have robots capable of doing anything imaginable - including inventing other robots - what do you need the have nots for?
1. That the economy is a zero-sum game, and improvements in productivity will displace workers. This is nonsense. Productivity improvements have always increased the economy rather than displacing.
The economy is growing, but wealth is being concentrated faster, thus buying power for Joe Average is going down.
2. That the purpose jobs is to "keep people busy" rather than producing goods and services.
In a capitalist economy the purpose of jobs is both to produce and to distribute: if you don't have a job, you don't get to tap the wellspring of production. So, we either paradigm shift our economy, create busywork, or watch the masses fall into abject poverty even as production soars to new heights.
That the means of production will be concentrated in the hands of "the rich" or "the elite". This is not what is happening.
This is precisely what's happening, and has been for decades. Wages corrected for inflation are going down, and have for a long time now. That's why people have such problems with debt.
The shop is run by middle class people.
And middle class is getting smaller and smaller as people fall off it.
Each automation wave brings stuff that was previously only found among the wealthy into the hands of the common man. I expect this time to see a boom in personal shoppers, wedding planners, interior decorators, home theater consultants, car shopping assistants, and a bunch of services I've never heard of because they're still only for the rich (all the ones I listed are already taking off).
How will the common man pay for these, if the common man doesn't have a job? That's the real problem: at some point the service industry has to connect to manufacturing industry for manufactured goods to flow. And the less manufacturing jobs are left, the less weddings or home theaters the people working them require.
I suppose the absolute best outcome of this would be a huge upsurge of cultural production (entertainment), but that would require a huge cultural change and lots of re-education as well.
These exact same fears were written about in 1880. Every wave of automation works the same way - as costs fall, people can buy stuff (or services) they couldn't before, and different industries need more workers.
But they also need workers with a different skillset. Those laid off were shit out of luck back then and are so now, leading to massive suffering (and also numerous Communist revolutions, back in the 1880s and potentially now). And the waves are coming faster and faster.
Every human being simply does not have the potential to be a great engineer or artist (and even if they did, those jobs will be automated eventually). And the idea that the unemployed should have subsistence level existence (if that) and accept any McJob (until they're automated too) seems to a sticky one. So the future looks grim for most people, back then and also now.
For instance, we can ask flour manufactures to increase security, add serial numbers to bags so we can better track them and reduce siphoning off.
I'm sorry, but I simply don't see how this stops anyone from going to a grocery store, buying flour, and walking out. One kilogram of wheat flour, for example, contains around 14 MJ. Compare this to TNTs 4 MJ/kg, and it should be obvious that getting enough flour is not a problem for would-be terrorist.
We could try to encourage the use of less explosive alternatives, perhaps other grains.
All grains are explosive. Your body gains energy from them through slowly burning them, which means they're combustible, which means they're explosive in powdery form. So is sawdust, and navel flint for that matter (for the terrorist who wants to go the extra mile:p). That was kinda my point.
We haven't seen any flour+air IEDs yet so far as I know, so I'm thinking that its use on a large scale is not feasible. If it becomes a problem, we can find ways to limit its use in IEDs in various ways.
I'm quite interested in Dune not being sci-fi, because that's so ridiculous it should be on a meme.
Dune's setting is carefully constructed to enforce semi-medieval status, from Butlerian jihad banning computers to forcefields that force melee combat to the return of feudalism. This effectively weeds out any sci-fi tropes. At the same time it has a hearty dose of fantasy tropes, from witches to ghosts possessing their descendants to magical worm-juice that grants precognition.
Dune is high fantasy with spaceships (who's pilots need magical worm-juice to fly them). It's sci-fi in the same sense Spelljammer is.
Science fiction, as opposed to regular fiction, [and religion] has an element of believability and/or possibility.
Hard science fiction does. Most science fiction is not hard, and no more possible than your average fantasy novel. And the summary specifically mentions Dune, which is sci-fi in name only.
It means you will not get updates via normal channels, or normal channel updates might break it. That simply is not something most datacenters want to deal with.
But it's something datacenters will have to deal with anyway. After all, there's no guarantee that any update won't break something, so they'll need an internal update server that only gets vetted and tested updates - and at that point it's not much of a bother to include out-of-tree patches, assuming of course that they give a significant advantage.
We knew in the 1970s that solar panels would repay the energy cost of their production well within their lifetimes; back then it was seven years, for polycrystalline panels. Today it's three years, for thin-film. What's next? Wind keeps getting better as well.
Suppose a windmill lasts, on average, 20 years before needing replacement. That means you need to replace 1/20th of them every year just to keep the production capacity where it is. This means a huge, permanent money sink. And the same goes for solar panels too, of course.
The problem is that renewables are quite dispersed, so you need lots and lots and lots of infrastructure to gather them, which needs lots and lots and lots of maintenance. Also, to actually perform this maintenance you need roads (which also need to be maintained) and you also need to transmit the power somehow.
Sunny Germany seems to be able to produce its power via Solar.
It would make sense for the government to try to build one, if it were able to see beyond the next election or two and didn't have better options like renewables and fusion to throw money at.
Fusion reactors don't exist and renewables are so absurdly expensive that relying on them would collapse what's left of the economy. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are running out and fission is scary.
We might have to accept that the time of cheap energy and with it the high point of human civilization is past, in which case the relevant questions are: how orderly will the transition back to pre-industrial agrarian poverty be? Can we keep relatively peaceful nation-states intact in the face of increasingly costly communication and transportation? How will we re-educate the vast majority of population who's skills are completely useless in a primitive society? And how will we deal with the inevitable die-off as agricultural output plummets?
And now that I've read a couple of TFA's, it sounds like... they might even release an ENTIRE MOVIE devote to Jar Jar, if they felt like it. They're talking about alternating between standalone character-based movies, and episodes of the main plot line.
Well, isn't that a good thing? Anyone(?) who wants to see Jar-Jar can watch the J-J movies, and anyone who doesn't doesn't lose much else.
Protip: if you find yourself talking about "pussies" your plan is probably more testosterone than logic. Great for exercise programs, terrible for strategy.
Investigate every mosque. If you preach violence (which 80% of them do, according to a 2011 study) then you get shut down or the imam is replaced. If a politician promotes evil they can be impeached. If an imam preaches evil (as in, the hate speech that comprises around 17% of the material the Qur'an, hadiths and sira) then they should be punished under existing hate speech laws.
I can't comment on an accuracy of an unnamed study, but you do realize that you're basically accusing the entire law enforcement system of massive corruption here? After all, you're saying that 80% of mosques break laws yet the law enforcement ignores it. And not only that, but they're taking a risk of massive backlash in the wake of terrorist incident such as this should this fact become public. Does that sound believable to you? Because it doesn't sound that way to me.
It is that simple. No persecution of Muslims required, no mass deportation, no violence of any kind.
No, just giving up freedoms of religion and speech. No big deal, that, no sir.
Jihadis have been carrying out their operations for 1400 years because the Qur'an tells them to. That is the reason they say they do it, why is it so hard for the political Left to accept them at their word?
Because while it might be the immediate reason, the Qur'an is not a magical tome that compels obedience of anyone who reads it. If someone decides to follow any real or imagined call to violence contained there, it is still their decision, and they must have some kind of reason for it. So why did they, and how can anyone else be prevented from deciding so (other than having the government approve or disapprove of religious teaching, as you suggested)?
Now grab some popcorn and watch the verbal gymnastics of the Obama Administration and all politicians, as well as most mainstream media as they try and guess motivations.
It's called "diplomacy", and it's necessary to avoid keeping terrorist recruiters material to work with. But I guess there's a reason why they, rather than you, are at charge.
It is time for all Free People to work to shut down political Islam and turn it back into a mere nonsense personal faith/superstition.
Free People who heed calls like that won't stay free for long.
Once Iran gets nukes we won't have the luxury of letting the Left remain in their delusions. As soon as they get a chance places like "Ground Zero" in New York could well take on its real meaning. A city-wide lockdown will not protect a city once the jihadis get themselves a backpack nuke (once Iran gets the technology there is no telling what will happen).
Apart from "nuke" and "backpack nuke" being completely different level of technology, you're also assuming that the leaders of Iran have such incorruptible pure pureness that they'll sacrifice their lives, country and power to practice what they preach, rather than just say whatever they think will get them more earthly power.
Everything else you said was already stupid, but claiming that Islam can make politicians honest crosses the line into pure insanity.
By spreading panic by making absurd claims about how their lifestyle was being destroyed by the powers that be, thus necessiating a revolution to return to their glorious mythical past. You know, a bit like you're doing here.
A viable solution might be to legalize drugs and severely increase penalties for drug-related crimes and domestic violence.
If a drug causes you to lose capacity for rational thought, increasing penalties won't have any effect, since taking penalties into account requires rational thought.
A better solution would be to classify mind-altering substances into three categories: safe (people can buy them for home consumption), dangerous (people can use them, but only under supervision) and deadly (addictive stuff that kills you - remains forbidden).
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Let's say we have a hundred hairdressers and Joe Automated Factory Owner (who kicked out his employees when he automated the factory, which is why they became hairdressers). The hairdressers can care for each other's hair all they want, but only Joe can actually pay them. And Joe only has one head and a hundred hairdressers competing for it, so one lucky hairdresser gets to work for a sandwich per day (as long as he also calls Joe "sir") and the rest starve. Because, now matter how many combovers they might give for one another, the only one who can pay them with something valuable is Joe and Joe only needs one hairdresser - and even that is not really an important need, so even that poor bastard lives in constant fear and must obey Joe's every whim or starve.
That is the problem. An automated factory only connects to the rest of the economy through its owner(s), not workers (since it doesn't have any). This creates a chokepoint for how fast the wealth it produces can enter the rest of the economy. And if all productive capability is behind such chokepoints, then whoever owns the factories become filthy rich and the rest become poor to the point of starving.
It comes from automated factories - that was the whole premise of this discussion. The factory doesn't have workers since it doesn't need any, so where will the people work?
Or to put it another way: what value can you provide the factory owner in exchange of some of the goods his automated factory produces? And how essential is that value - in other words, how precarious will your position be?
It does, those who own it. The rest are left fighting for table scraps as usual - except their position will be far worse than before, since they lack what little power they had, since they are no longer needed to keep factories working.
The question is: how bad do things become first?
It's hard to not be dismissive of economists when their supposed expertise seems to be good for nothing but having the economy limp from one crisis to another.
Well of course they do. Debauchery is hard work; constant drug-fueled orgies require a strict diet and exercise regimen to keep up with. The latter is why atheists wear special shoes, which apparently have a tendency to go missing on mail, which is probably what the grandparent was referring to.
So, does that officially make Evangelicals evil cultists? I mean, trying to get an end-of-the-world prophecy started is usually the domain of villains...
Gravity is a natural law. Social Darwinism is not. It's a recent and bad idea.
True, but irrelevant, because no one who lives now can "feed themselves" without help from others, with the possible exception of some members of hunter-gatherer tribes. The fact is, humans are a social species, and how that society is arranged and resources distributed is not a "natural law" but simply a function of culture.
It would be even simpler and less cruel if people wanting to demonstrate their toughness would do so through ascetism or something rather than sociopathy. No one's impressed by you mortificating someone else's flesh, you weakling, except perhaps other weaklings.
Well, no. Even a scandinavian who views himself as a hard-core capitalist isn't going to get "pissed off" at the description, simply because the word "socialist" is not an insult in Scandinavia. It's a political view along all others, who's merits and shortcomings can be discussed between rational adults without anyone getting emotionally distraught.
And that is why Scandinavia has succesfully combined the good sides of both socialism and capitalism. There's a lesson in that.
The technical term is "welfare state". And of course it is related to socialism, specifically to social democracy. Or did you perhaps think that the Scandinavian owning class is such a higher breed than your own as to overcome greed by itself, without being forced to?
But if the haves don't need the have nots for a workforce, what do they care? The only purpose of money is to convince someone to do something for you; if you have robots capable of doing anything imaginable - including inventing other robots - what do you need the have nots for?
The economy is growing, but wealth is being concentrated faster, thus buying power for Joe Average is going down.
In a capitalist economy the purpose of jobs is both to produce and to distribute: if you don't have a job, you don't get to tap the wellspring of production. So, we either paradigm shift our economy, create busywork, or watch the masses fall into abject poverty even as production soars to new heights.
That the means of production will be concentrated in the hands of "the rich" or "the elite". This is not what is happening.
This is precisely what's happening, and has been for decades. Wages corrected for inflation are going down, and have for a long time now. That's why people have such problems with debt.
And middle class is getting smaller and smaller as people fall off it.
How will the common man pay for these, if the common man doesn't have a job? That's the real problem: at some point the service industry has to connect to manufacturing industry for manufactured goods to flow. And the less manufacturing jobs are left, the less weddings or home theaters the people working them require.
I suppose the absolute best outcome of this would be a huge upsurge of cultural production (entertainment), but that would require a huge cultural change and lots of re-education as well.
But they also need workers with a different skillset. Those laid off were shit out of luck back then and are so now, leading to massive suffering (and also numerous Communist revolutions, back in the 1880s and potentially now). And the waves are coming faster and faster.
Every human being simply does not have the potential to be a great engineer or artist (and even if they did, those jobs will be automated eventually). And the idea that the unemployed should have subsistence level existence (if that) and accept any McJob (until they're automated too) seems to a sticky one. So the future looks grim for most people, back then and also now.
I'm sorry, but I simply don't see how this stops anyone from going to a grocery store, buying flour, and walking out. One kilogram of wheat flour, for example, contains around 14 MJ. Compare this to TNTs 4 MJ/kg, and it should be obvious that getting enough flour is not a problem for would-be terrorist.
All grains are explosive. Your body gains energy from them through slowly burning them, which means they're combustible, which means they're explosive in powdery form. So is sawdust, and navel flint for that matter (for the terrorist who wants to go the extra mile :p). That was kinda my point.
Which one are you going to ban, flour or air?
Dune's setting is carefully constructed to enforce semi-medieval status, from Butlerian jihad banning computers to forcefields that force melee combat to the return of feudalism. This effectively weeds out any sci-fi tropes. At the same time it has a hearty dose of fantasy tropes, from witches to ghosts possessing their descendants to magical worm-juice that grants precognition.
Dune is high fantasy with spaceships (who's pilots need magical worm-juice to fly them). It's sci-fi in the same sense Spelljammer is.
Hard science fiction does. Most science fiction is not hard, and no more possible than your average fantasy novel. And the summary specifically mentions Dune, which is sci-fi in name only.
But it's something datacenters will have to deal with anyway. After all, there's no guarantee that any update won't break something, so they'll need an internal update server that only gets vetted and tested updates - and at that point it's not much of a bother to include out-of-tree patches, assuming of course that they give a significant advantage.
If $1600 is not a big deal it's unlikely you're a professional anything, since "professional" implies you work for a living.
Suppose a windmill lasts, on average, 20 years before needing replacement. That means you need to replace 1/20th of them every year just to keep the production capacity where it is. This means a huge, permanent money sink. And the same goes for solar panels too, of course.
The problem is that renewables are quite dispersed, so you need lots and lots and lots of infrastructure to gather them, which needs lots and lots and lots of maintenance. Also, to actually perform this maintenance you need roads (which also need to be maintained) and you also need to transmit the power somehow.
But at a cost.
Fusion reactors don't exist and renewables are so absurdly expensive that relying on them would collapse what's left of the economy. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are running out and fission is scary.
We might have to accept that the time of cheap energy and with it the high point of human civilization is past, in which case the relevant questions are: how orderly will the transition back to pre-industrial agrarian poverty be? Can we keep relatively peaceful nation-states intact in the face of increasingly costly communication and transportation? How will we re-educate the vast majority of population who's skills are completely useless in a primitive society? And how will we deal with the inevitable die-off as agricultural output plummets?
So you're saying that the money should be spent on making higher education free instead? How's that not a social program?
Well, isn't that a good thing? Anyone(?) who wants to see Jar-Jar can watch the J-J movies, and anyone who doesn't doesn't lose much else.
Protip: if you find yourself talking about "pussies" your plan is probably more testosterone than logic. Great for exercise programs, terrible for strategy.
I can't comment on an accuracy of an unnamed study, but you do realize that you're basically accusing the entire law enforcement system of massive corruption here? After all, you're saying that 80% of mosques break laws yet the law enforcement ignores it. And not only that, but they're taking a risk of massive backlash in the wake of terrorist incident such as this should this fact become public. Does that sound believable to you? Because it doesn't sound that way to me.
No, just giving up freedoms of religion and speech. No big deal, that, no sir.
Because while it might be the immediate reason, the Qur'an is not a magical tome that compels obedience of anyone who reads it. If someone decides to follow any real or imagined call to violence contained there, it is still their decision, and they must have some kind of reason for it. So why did they, and how can anyone else be prevented from deciding so (other than having the government approve or disapprove of religious teaching, as you suggested)?
It's called "diplomacy", and it's necessary to avoid keeping terrorist recruiters material to work with. But I guess there's a reason why they, rather than you, are at charge.
Free People who heed calls like that won't stay free for long.
Apart from "nuke" and "backpack nuke" being completely different level of technology, you're also assuming that the leaders of Iran have such incorruptible pure pureness that they'll sacrifice their lives, country and power to practice what they preach, rather than just say whatever they think will get them more earthly power.
Everything else you said was already stupid, but claiming that Islam can make politicians honest crosses the line into pure insanity.
By spreading panic by making absurd claims about how their lifestyle was being destroyed by the powers that be, thus necessiating a revolution to return to their glorious mythical past. You know, a bit like you're doing here.
If a drug causes you to lose capacity for rational thought, increasing penalties won't have any effect, since taking penalties into account requires rational thought.
A better solution would be to classify mind-altering substances into three categories: safe (people can buy them for home consumption), dangerous (people can use them, but only under supervision) and deadly (addictive stuff that kills you - remains forbidden).
Blaming other people for your problems might be just a bit older than that...
It is unlikely that your concept of any entity - even yourself - is entirely accurate, so your argument seems rather like splitting hairs.