By that stage the robots will be maintaining themselves without human intervention.
We are seriously going to have to do something when human unemployment reaches 99%. Letting the remaining 1% keep control of all the wealth (and robots) is not a viable option.
The other 75% to 80% still have money to buy burgers.
Once you start getting an average 25% unemployment, it means that in some areas of society it will be over 50%. You get that in places like Spain now.
There is a limit to how long people will put up with this, and you can't just start to kill anyone who protests without risking a full scale revolution.
I'll bet many of them would be happier simply because then they could get a 2nd job and make 40% more income by continuing to work 8-10 hours a day, since 1) they're used to working that much, and 2) enjoyment of free time is dependent on quality rather than quantity (would you mope around for an extra 4 hours a day, or spend the weekend on your new boat?).
Enjoyment of free time is most certainly not dependent on quality rather than uantity. Otherwise everyone would choose to work 120 hours a week and savour that precious hour they got at Sunday lunchtime.
I came from a former communist state to witness the self-destruction of the so-called free world. Check when the west started sliding to good old "shot the strikers" days of capitalism. Yhea, when the wall collapsed. NO need to pretend anymore that the little person matters. No fear from workers revolution - this is "red" and it failed , right?
That is very interesting. While there was the old West/East divide, the West had to keep making concessions to democracy and the rights of the majority in order to maintain the moral highground over the East.
Now the divide has gone, it's all a race to the bottom.
All corporate theft is enabled by the government, as corporations are implicit creations of governments, and are given special privileges by them.
Corporations are explicit creations of capitalists/capitalism. The free market decided that it would be much easier to raise capital by creating limited liability companies that you could buy shares in (and thus finance business) without risking your whole life savings if something went wrong.
I suppose you could call the legal and social framework necessary to support this idea "the government" but it's not really very helpful.
I sense that you are coming from the libertarian direction, where everything that involves the government is bad, and nothing that is bad is in any way the necessary result of free market capitalism.
What fantasy land do you live in where corporations value the happiness of their employees? Or to be more blunt, openly willing to spend more on paid vacation time? It took unions to get fair pay for workers and look what is happening to them. Do you honestly think a company will waste profits on its employees without being forced to?
You are absolutely right. The answer is to force them. Once machines are doing all the work/wealth creation, there will be no justification for any human being to be much richer than another anyway. We'll end up with some form of communism. See "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde.
The alternative, of a tiny minority of incredibly wealthy people effectively owning everything won't work in the long run, because the machines in charge will have no reason to favour that elite on the basis of an old fashioned notion like ownership of capital/property. They won't want billions of poor, disaffected humans just waiting around to smash things up.
It's corporation tax, which is very different. If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?
No, the point is that companies like Google (and Amazon and Starbucks) aren't just doing business "on the internet". They're operating in the UK and using accounting shenanigans to pretend that they're making little or no profit in the UK. (And the same goes for the US, EU or anywhere else). This is clearly bollocks, or else they wouldn't be operating in these countries. Companies don't operate somewhere for the sheer hell of it, they do it because they're making money there.
Yet through the exploitation of tax law, all the profits magically end up in the Cayman Islands or somewhere else where there is low or no corporation tax.
Now, the argument that this is the fault of the tax laws is strictly speaking correct, but certainly in the UK we are now deciding to let HMRC loose on some of these companies to tighten up their compliance and hopefully set aside some of the more blatant abuses and exploitations of loopholes. It is time for the government to squeeze every penny they can out of corporations, just like they're doing with individuals, and HMRC can stop being so cosy with the corporations involved.
Under UK tax law, HMRC can in fact disallow schemes which exist purely to save tax and have no business purpose, it's time they started doing more of this with large corporations and not just individuals.
I guess I wonder what should Google do. Should they pay the maximum amount the UK government wants, and avoid all possible deductions and loopholes? Or should they pick the "normal" deductions that other UK businesses use? Something in between? Which deductions/loopholes should they choose? Which ones are ethical? And by whose standards are they ethical?
All I know is that if Google UK is a profitable organisation, then it should be paying tax on those profits. HMRC (and the company's auditors) should be ensuring that they can't magic away all the profits to a postbox in the Cayman Islands.
The problem is that most billionaires probably don't think that things like unemployment benefit and social security are a good idea at all, and would never voluntarily contribute to them.
All taxation is unfair. Taxation is, essentially, legalised theft.
No it isn't. It's a means of redistributing wealth, which is why rightwing Americans in particular hate it so much. Some people pay more tax, some less, but it all goes to paying for things that are for the benefit of society as a whole.
The results for "pussy" were especially pathetic, because not only did it bring up no pictures of what most adult men think of when they think pussy, it didn't even display any images of cats!
I think that pretty much since "Are You being Served" and Mrs Slocombe's legendary wet pussy, no one uses the word "pussy" to refer to a cat any more. It's like pronouncing Uranus as Your-anus, it's just asking for a snigger.
Yes, I think the "we were just doing sexual anatomy lessons" defence is never going to sound too convincing whether you're talking about internet searches, or why they found you with your twelve year old neighbour's legs wrapped round your back.
You can always tell the parents by their irrational, fear based approach to the world.
If you're a parent and have no fears about your children, there's something wrong with you. It's not necessarily irrational, although obviously a lot of people take it too far. Nurturing and protecting children is half the fucking point of being a parent, whether you're human or a cat. And yes, you also have to educate them and prepare them for making their own way in the world, too.
I might not be a parent, but I was a child once. I have also been in a position to teach children, and when a parent said they did the work with the child that meant they did it for the child.
No, not really. I do homework with my 8 and 10 year old kids. It's difficult, but you need to and can resist the temptation just to do everything for them. But a bit of extra explanation and some slightly leading questions can work wonders.
I like the way he's surprised that if you do a search for "inflamed anus" or something, you might get a hairy-arsed old geezer's flaming ringpiece rather than the hoped-for sweet chocolate starfish of a female pornstar.
1280x1024 is a decent resolution only on a mobile phone and lower-end tablets.
Bollocks. For most normal computer tasks (word processing, browsing the web, reading email, playing farmville) a 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution is fine.
Most people are not developers with a need for ten different windows open on their screen.
Are you some kind of billionaire that you think a million US$ is a small amount of money? That's more than the combined life savings of both of my (retired) parents combined. You can live very comfortably for a lot of years with that amount of money.
You're missing the point that it is a relatively small amount to sell your soul for.
Wow... I haven't seen that kind of threat of violence since... yesterday, when the Michigan union bosses promised "there will be blood". Does the left have to physically threaten all their opponents?
Does the right think that it is exempt from the consequences of their actions?
So what happens after the water goes south and continues to go south?
Yeah, that's insightful, but the straight-man answer is basic liability.
The people, cities, and government sue/prosecute/regulate the industry. When you can prove that, yes you indeed DID do things that violated EPA regulations then out comes the axe. The fear of being brought to the axe-block is what keeps people from doing bad things. That's, at least the idea.
So once the water goes south, this keeps it from continuing to go south.
Most of us who aren't libertarians would suggest that the easier way of doing this would be for the government/cities/people to pass lawa preventing the industry fucking things up in the first place, but I know that's an evil socialist infringement on the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
We are seriously going to have to do something when human unemployment reaches 99%. Letting the remaining 1% keep control of all the wealth (and robots) is not a viable option.
Don't think binary.
Think 20 to 25% unemployment.
The other 75% to 80% still have money to buy burgers.
Once you start getting an average 25% unemployment, it means that in some areas of society it will be over 50%. You get that in places like Spain now.
There is a limit to how long people will put up with this, and you can't just start to kill anyone who protests without risking a full scale revolution.
I'll bet many of them would be happier simply because then they could get a 2nd job and make 40% more income by continuing to work 8-10 hours a day, since 1) they're used to working that much, and 2) enjoyment of free time is dependent on quality rather than quantity (would you mope around for an extra 4 hours a day, or spend the weekend on your new boat?).
Enjoyment of free time is most certainly not dependent on quality rather than uantity. Otherwise everyone would choose to work 120 hours a week and savour that precious hour they got at Sunday lunchtime.
You've been drinking the capitalist Kool Aid.
I came from a former communist state to witness the self-destruction of the so-called free world. Check when the west started sliding to good old "shot the strikers" days of capitalism. Yhea, when the wall collapsed. NO need to pretend anymore that the little person matters. No fear from workers revolution - this is "red" and it failed , right?
That is very interesting. While there was the old West/East divide, the West had to keep making concessions to democracy and the rights of the majority in order to maintain the moral highground over the East.
Now the divide has gone, it's all a race to the bottom.
Wrong.
Europe has different laws, not by choice. Try again.
Europe has different laws because society/the people want those laws. At least we don't simply bow down before the Market.
All corporate theft is enabled by the government, as corporations are implicit creations of governments, and are given special privileges by them.
Corporations are explicit creations of capitalists/capitalism. The free market decided that it would be much easier to raise capital by creating limited liability companies that you could buy shares in (and thus finance business) without risking your whole life savings if something went wrong.
I suppose you could call the legal and social framework necessary to support this idea "the government" but it's not really very helpful.
I sense that you are coming from the libertarian direction, where everything that involves the government is bad, and nothing that is bad is in any way the necessary result of free market capitalism.
What fantasy land do you live in where corporations value the happiness of their employees? Or to be more blunt, openly willing to spend more on paid vacation time? It took unions to get fair pay for workers and look what is happening to them. Do you honestly think a company will waste profits on its employees without being forced to?
You are absolutely right. The answer is to force them. Once machines are doing all the work/wealth creation, there will be no justification for any human being to be much richer than another anyway. We'll end up with some form of communism. See "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde.
The alternative, of a tiny minority of incredibly wealthy people effectively owning everything won't work in the long run, because the machines in charge will have no reason to favour that elite on the basis of an old fashioned notion like ownership of capital/property. They won't want billions of poor, disaffected humans just waiting around to smash things up.
It's corporation tax, which is very different. If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?
No, the point is that companies like Google (and Amazon and Starbucks) aren't just doing business "on the internet". They're operating in the UK and using accounting shenanigans to pretend that they're making little or no profit in the UK. (And the same goes for the US, EU or anywhere else). This is clearly bollocks, or else they wouldn't be operating in these countries. Companies don't operate somewhere for the sheer hell of it, they do it because they're making money there.
Yet through the exploitation of tax law, all the profits magically end up in the Cayman Islands or somewhere else where there is low or no corporation tax.
Now, the argument that this is the fault of the tax laws is strictly speaking correct, but certainly in the UK we are now deciding to let HMRC loose on some of these companies to tighten up their compliance and hopefully set aside some of the more blatant abuses and exploitations of loopholes. It is time for the government to squeeze every penny they can out of corporations, just like they're doing with individuals, and HMRC can stop being so cosy with the corporations involved.
Under UK tax law, HMRC can in fact disallow schemes which exist purely to save tax and have no business purpose, it's time they started doing more of this with large corporations and not just individuals.
I guess I wonder what should Google do. Should they pay the maximum amount the UK government wants, and avoid all possible deductions and loopholes? Or should they pick the "normal" deductions that other UK businesses use? Something in between? Which deductions/loopholes should they choose? Which ones are ethical? And by whose standards are they ethical?
All I know is that if Google UK is a profitable organisation, then it should be paying tax on those profits. HMRC (and the company's auditors) should be ensuring that they can't magic away all the profits to a postbox in the Cayman Islands.
The problem is that most billionaires probably don't think that things like unemployment benefit and social security are a good idea at all, and would never voluntarily contribute to them.
All taxation is unfair. Taxation is, essentially, legalised theft.
No it isn't. It's a means of redistributing wealth, which is why rightwing Americans in particular hate it so much. Some people pay more tax, some less, but it all goes to paying for things that are for the benefit of society as a whole.
The results for "pussy" were especially pathetic, because not only did it bring up no pictures of what most adult men think of when they think pussy, it didn't even display any images of cats!
I think that pretty much since "Are You being Served" and Mrs Slocombe's legendary wet pussy, no one uses the word "pussy" to refer to a cat any more. It's like pronouncing Uranus as Your-anus, it's just asking for a snigger.
If you think the goatse guy pic isn't sexual, you're the one who's having troubles telling fantasy from reality.
Yes, I think the "we were just doing sexual anatomy lessons" defence is never going to sound too convincing whether you're talking about internet searches, or why they found you with your twelve year old neighbour's legs wrapped round your back.
You can always tell the parents by their irrational, fear based approach to the world.
If you're a parent and have no fears about your children, there's something wrong with you. It's not necessarily irrational, although obviously a lot of people take it too far. Nurturing and protecting children is half the fucking point of being a parent, whether you're human or a cat. And yes, you also have to educate them and prepare them for making their own way in the world, too.
Doing it with them is doing it for them.
I might not be a parent, but I was a child once. I have also been in a position to teach children, and when a parent said they did the work with the child that meant they did it for the child.
No, not really. I do homework with my 8 and 10 year old kids. It's difficult, but you need to and can resist the temptation just to do everything for them. But a bit of extra explanation and some slightly leading questions can work wonders.
Jesus Christ, I'll never be able to see pictures of boobs on the internet again!
You did a Google Image Search for his ailment?
I like the way he's surprised that if you do a search for "inflamed anus" or something, you might get a hairy-arsed old geezer's flaming ringpiece rather than the hoped-for sweet chocolate starfish of a female pornstar.
But at 70"X5", that's only a 65" screen by traditional diagonal measurements.
I think your post is going to go down as a classic, and I mean in a "potatoe" rather than a "I have a dream" sense.
1280x1024 is a decent resolution only on a mobile phone and lower-end tablets.
Bollocks. For most normal computer tasks (word processing, browsing the web, reading email, playing farmville) a 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution is fine.
Most people are not developers with a need for ten different windows open on their screen.
NSFW tag?
Do you work in Saudi Arabia or something? You get a lot more revealing photos than that on the sidebar of the Daily Mail website. Apparently.
If you're not trying to troll, then you must just be naturally gifted in the troll arts.
Are you some kind of billionaire that you think a million US$ is a small amount of money? That's more than the combined life savings of both of my (retired) parents combined. You can live very comfortably for a lot of years with that amount of money.
You're missing the point that it is a relatively small amount to sell your soul for.
Wow... I haven't seen that kind of threat of violence since... yesterday, when the Michigan union bosses promised "there will be blood". Does the left have to physically threaten all their opponents?
Does the right think that it is exempt from the consequences of their actions?
So what happens after the water goes south and continues to go south?
Yeah, that's insightful, but the straight-man answer is basic liability. The people, cities, and government sue/prosecute/regulate the industry. When you can prove that, yes you indeed DID do things that violated EPA regulations then out comes the axe. The fear of being brought to the axe-block is what keeps people from doing bad things. That's, at least the idea. So once the water goes south, this keeps it from continuing to go south.
Most of us who aren't libertarians would suggest that the easier way of doing this would be for the government/cities/people to pass lawa preventing the industry fucking things up in the first place, but I know that's an evil socialist infringement on the free market.