If the mission ends successfully, there's of course no need. If the mission fails, yes, you might find useful the telemetry you couldn't get otherwise. On the other hand, the only accident involving plasma at reentry that I'm aware off is Columbia's and it seems all the needed info was gathered anyway.
Mind me, I'm not saying it's not worthy, I'm saying that it's far from crucial.
"Clever and useful -- we will be able to hear clearly the screams of the next crew when they fall down in pieces."
More or less my thoughts. While I see the obvious human curiosity seeing the reentry radio silence as over-frustrating, I don't see it as "the most cruicial time of a re-entry" when comunications are of any use. How much can a ship take corrections at that stage? Before and after, yes, but what can be done in that precise stage so the comunication channel becomes the difference between live and death?
"Accountability comes in many forms. From the opinions of others of you, [when a comment sparks a boycott, or gets you fired from your job] to being sued for liable, and many shades in between."
So your answer to "what's allowed accountability for free speech" is, it seems, any kind of public penalty and any kind of civil liability, but not criminal prosecution. Is it all that? Are you aware that under your limits it becomes "kosher" to be killed by a mob that happens to disagree with your opinions?
The second question still gets unanswered. Is it OK to suffer civil prosecution but not criminal prosecution just because Mr D from 63 says so, or is there any higher authority that, preferably in written, states what's proper accountability for excessive use of free speech and what's not?
"The USA has 319 million people. The EU has 503 million people. Sure not all of them speak English but the fraction is still significant enough"
No, it isn't and what's more important, while you might find you can do business with a little fraction of the already little fraction of global population of nerds, you won't go business into a mass market in a foreign language. You won't find, for instance, and add on TV or on press in nothing but the local language. But, hey, don't take my word for it and just try me wrong.
"As for the regulations it doesn't explain it. If regulations were the problem why is Silicon Valley in California to begin with and not somewhere else with less regulation?"
I didn't talk about too much/too little regulation but *different* regulations. Just for the last one, if you open an e-shop in Europe you need to account for all diferent VAT percentages in every country. Do you want to open a mill in an EU country (not your own, I'll take for a given that you know your own country's legal system)? Now you need to know about its labour laws, probably you'll need to incorporate there with its own set of laws and regulations. Do you want to trade-mark/patent something? You'd better go and do it on each and every country. Do you collect your users' data? You'd better know each and every country privacy law's petty details, etc.
All this has become better in the last, say, 10~15 years but it is still nightmarish.
"A. Europe isn't (as) unified a market as the USA. [...] B. Venture capital. More specifically series B and C of funding. It is so much easier to get $30 million from VCs in the US than it is in Europe."
These two things are one and the same: you won't get such kind of money because you don't have reach to a market big enough to justify the investment at a low enough risk level. Creating a company with a viable product/service out of thin air is difficult and, therefore, financing it quite risky, but having then to jump it to a dozen different countries and do it fast enough that competition don't kill you in the meantime becomes at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
"A lot of people in Europe speak English as a second language. The language thing is less of a barrier than people make it out to be"
Well, standard wisdom will say it *is* a tremendous barrier, specifically for the kind of global reach business that this story is about. You certainly will *not* get any significant market penetration in Spain if you don't go Spanish, or in Italy if you don't go Italian, or French in France, etc. But, hey, don't let the fact that nobody has managed to develop a hugh roots market in a single language in EU before stop you. After all, what looks like a showstopper for most people can be an oportunity for the visionary.
But you are certainly right on a thing: it is not language which is the real barrier, it is having like two dozen different sovereign countries within, with his different laws, trademarks, bureaucracies, etc. Sum all these barriers of entry and you'll understand why is so much difficult for a business in EU to "explode" from start-up to billion-euro company with the speed and frequency it can happen in USA.
"It turns out, however, that we all just handed the power over to different middlemen who now use more sophisticated tools to squeeze the artist back to a position of bare survival."
As it came to a surprise.
This has been, more or less, a capitalist market (quite so, since it was a novelty). Even Adam Smith knew that leaving capitalism alone, it is the land owners the ones that extract the most rent, with farmers being left at the point of bare survival. Here the public is the land the author nurtures via her books -and the public nowadays is owned by Amazon. The more free market tools are thrown to me mixture, the more certain this kind of output is to be.
"That makes the difference between those who can do a job, and those who are really good at it."
But still, as you say, you need to encourage it.
"The latter are rare to find."
Not only because good professionals at any trade are difficult to find (after all, no matter the average, the top performers are always a tiny minority), but because that's not what people look for.
It's difficult to defend oneself as being a 'jack of all trades, master of no one', when the one making the hirings specifically looks for something "with two years experience on, say, VMWare 5.0" instead of "virtualization servers and IaaS". No wonder the prospective employees specialize in being good at what the employers are looking for: tools instead of principles.
"Because the majority of blank media is not used to copy music, this would be similar to all drivers paying an "illegal road use" tax on gasoline because a tiny minority transport "copyrighted" goods on the roads without permission from the copyright holder."
The fact that is done that way (taxing blank media) and that it is not related to "taxation without representation" doesn't mean I agree with it.
First, the industry rationale: you pay the tax on the blank media because you are not paying for the *use* of the blank media to copy music, but for the *right* to do so independently if you in fact make use of that right or not. The tax then is supposedly calculated as a fraction of the total cost (so, say, if only 10% of blank media is used to copy music, the tax per support is only 10% of the "cost" of a copy).
Of course, this is a poor argument for what is in fact a powerful lobby keeping its cake and eating it too: on one hand, they have perverted the law because it is not about the "right" given by the copyright holders to me so I can make a private copy, but about the *privilege* I as a common man give to copyright holders of cultural makings to favour their industry (you can see this looking at how these kind of laws have changed their wording in the last 10 to 15 years). On the other hand, under a honest rationale, your conclusion is obvious: not all blank media -not even a majority of it, is used to copy music, so one should think if there's any other, more to the point, way to compensate copyright holders, which clearly is: in order for you to copy something, there *must* be an original to copy it from; that's the 'conditio sine qua non' so, the obvious output would be to tax the originals sold by the media industry. This way, it would also automatically make for the "formula" they use to calculate the compensation, which is returned in proportion to sellings. This would be the right thing to do, but then the industry would feel they might be losing sales, since the originals they sell would be a bit more expensive. And since this is not about rights but about extracting money from society -no matter if diserved or not, they press governments for this not to happen.
And the final example about how industry is not interested in rights but in siphoning money their way: they recieve the tax but still they try to use DRM so you can't exercise the right you are paying for. In other countries, they have been able to get the tax and still make illegal most cases of private copy.
"Typically when dealing with NTP you do not want big swings."
A second is not a "big swing" in general computation parlance. People working on near-RT systems already know -or should know, how to cope with leap seconds.
"In fact, a system using NTP that's too far out of sync, won't sync back up correctly."
Five to fifteen seconds at least. We are talking a different league, almost a different sport here.
"I work with Avaya voice equipment and we've been warning people about this for months and months. We've provided instructions on several methods to ensure this doesn't cripple your system"
Maybe the problem is that those Avaya systems should be able to cope with leap seconds on their own without having to warn and provide instructions.
"with some of the platforms, it will literally cripple the system."
"This is a violation of EU regulations, where, if such copying is allowed, there must be compensation from government."
Not from government. There should be compensation, full stop. Neither who pays for it nor up to what amount are pre-set.
But, hey, would you think EU legislators would rise to the obvious conclusion of charging a levvy on sold copies which are, by definition, the 'conditio sine qua non' to have anything to apply the private copy right to start with? Oh, no, of course not: they either pay in bulk with government money or they'll apply a levvy to blank supports.
"In many situations, you can use L'Hopital's Rule to resolve 0/0. No, you can't."
Yes you can.
"At least any mathematician will look at you with disgust if you claim that"
No mathematician will look at you with disgust by claiming that. Armchair wannabes, on the other hand...
Because any mathematician will know this is about programing, an algorithm context and, therefore, *in many situations* 0/0 will be a context case of f(x)/g(x) as both functions' independent variable approach zero, so a limit, that is, the very scenario L'Hopital's rule applies to.
There will be, of course, many other situations where this will not be the case, a thing both the mathematician and the parent poster are also well aware of.
"How do you come by these observations without surplus labor?"
No way at all since I never challenged such assertion.
I challenged the assertion that "Prior to the 20th century land was cheap or often free". That's why I higlighted it and that was the one I was answering to.
I also challenge your -new to the argument, assert that USA had any large labour surplus due to industralization -that was the case in Europe, though, and I also say that the only notable case of overall labour surplus in the USA, the Great Depresion, was not due to industralization taking jobs away but because of capital speculation.
"I think its clear that my comments were solely focused on the EU/US"
Yes, it was clear. That's why I made a point about the issue not being US centric. Less so given that the parent article (impact of a future "true" AI) makes no sense except on a global context. Anyway, land being cheap/free can't be any more far from true *specifically* in good ol'Europe if that's what your comment was focused on.
"and that conversations in general on this website are US-centric."
Some people repeating this meme once and again won't make it any more true. It's been years since Slashdot, despite being based in USA, goes far beyond that scope.
"And the basis of this thread implies the progress of capitalist systems"
Which, again, is much more a global issue than USA. Capitalism wasn't born in USA, while USA is probably the best example of its evolution, and basically no current macro-level socio-economic issue can be considered but globally. Can you, say, even start considering USA IT market without taking outsourcing into account, or USA consumerism trends without cheap Asian electronics?
"during this previous period was subject to similar labor pressures as those that will occur if robotics and software create a large excess of labor."
I'm sorry but I have to say again "bollocks". Accepting your USA-centric premise, USA has had only one period of significative labour force surplus and that had nothing to do with industriual revolution nor land avaliability: it was in the thirties due to the Great Depression, which was a purelly capital-driven bluff -you know the results.
Now, please note that I agree with your general argument: people has problems just lying down and starving to death, and yes I concede that there were in the past security valves that made things a bit easier (migration movements). It's only I disagree with your arguments' formulation which are only valid for USA, and only partly, not the world at large. Even in USA, wars have much more saying on the country's economic evolution than land ownership or migrational movements.
Even migration movements don't equate to free/cheap land but -you yourself suggest that, to labour forces. Hordes of Europeans didn't migrate to USA because of cheap land but because labour or social (due to European wars) demand: for the most part, immigrants didn't become landowners but workers.
"you've taken to argue with me because I haven't considered the Roman army, who apparently were able to give out 20acre/man to hundreds of thousands of soldiers because land was expensive and unavailable."
No, it is not that you forgot that, you are building a strawman. The argument is that you can go as far in the past as the Roman Empire and you won't find a period when land was cheap/free, not at least in Europe.
By the way, they where more in the thousands than in the hundreds of thousands but still, a fruitful argument for our current situation can be taken from that: that of artificial scarcity. One way or the other it took as much as 20 years of labour to earn a piece of land large enough to secure your retirement because of powerful forces wanting it that way. These kind of forces limiting access to sources of wealth are still in play, it's only it's not the emperor.
So it is not AI taking out jobs, it's our capitalist socioeconomic organization failing at distributing wealth as it is created.
"When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete."
Humm... no.
Money is a handy referent for wealth measure and there's no indication that there won't be differential wealth accruance just because machines do all the work.
For the most part of History "machines" already did all the work (just understand "slaves" or "serfs" being synonims to "machines"). Did that mean money was of no use back then? I mean, even among the "real people", not the "machines".
"This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about."
No, "we" don't get the dreamt leisure society if "we" happen to be in the "unnecessary people set that died".
"The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small"
Bullshit. It is capitalism the one being "too small", not the world. Come back to tell me the world can't support us once capitalism stops destroying crops in the thousands of millions of kilograms just to preserve itself. You migth have an argument then.
We outnumber Usain Bolt literally billions to one. Can you name someone running faster than him? It is not about the numbers but about the proper numbers. And regarding *raw* numbers, 99% are less than 2:1 to 1% regarding wealth accrual. Still an advantage but one that has been severily reduced in the last decades and looks like it's going to be reduced even more.
"In a democracy, no less."
And after we talked about raw numbers, then we need to qualify them. No, it is not a democracy, it is a *representative* democracy. Those that control the representation, control the outcome. And these are the 1%, not the 99%. And the 1% have quite a different vision of the world than the 99% (see i.e.: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/16/8...).
"If you cant manage to out fight or out vote them, then you deserve the shitty country you live in."
You know this is as stupid as it can be, right along with "if you can't defend yourself, you diserve to be raped", do you?
"Signed - Rest of the world."
I'm part of that "rest of the world": don't put yourself as if your idiotic arguments somehow represented me.
Slashdot Mirror
"We can send telemetry"
If the mission ends successfully, there's of course no need. If the mission fails, yes, you might find useful the telemetry you couldn't get otherwise. On the other hand, the only accident involving plasma at reentry that I'm aware off is Columbia's and it seems all the needed info was gathered anyway.
Mind me, I'm not saying it's not worthy, I'm saying that it's far from crucial.
"Clever and useful -- we will be able to hear clearly the screams of the next crew when they fall down in pieces."
More or less my thoughts. While I see the obvious human curiosity seeing the reentry radio silence as over-frustrating, I don't see it as "the most cruicial time of a re-entry" when comunications are of any use. How much can a ship take corrections at that stage? Before and after, yes, but what can be done in that precise stage so the comunication channel becomes the difference between live and death?
"Accountability comes in many forms. From the opinions of others of you, [when a comment sparks a boycott, or gets you fired from your job] to being sued for liable, and many shades in between."
So your answer to "what's allowed accountability for free speech" is, it seems, any kind of public penalty and any kind of civil liability, but not criminal prosecution. Is it all that? Are you aware that under your limits it becomes "kosher" to be killed by a mob that happens to disagree with your opinions?
The second question still gets unanswered. Is it OK to suffer civil prosecution but not criminal prosecution just because Mr D from 63 says so, or is there any higher authority that, preferably in written, states what's proper accountability for excessive use of free speech and what's not?
"You cited an example of criminal prosecution for expressing an opinion. That is not free speech."
What's the allowed accountability for free speech, then, and who is allowed to set what accountability is valid within free speech and what's not?
"The USA has 319 million people. The EU has 503 million people. Sure not all of them speak English but the fraction is still significant enough"
No, it isn't and what's more important, while you might find you can do business with a little fraction of the already little fraction of global population of nerds, you won't go business into a mass market in a foreign language. You won't find, for instance, and add on TV or on press in nothing but the local language. But, hey, don't take my word for it and just try me wrong.
"As for the regulations it doesn't explain it. If regulations were the problem why is Silicon Valley in California to begin with and not somewhere else with less regulation?"
I didn't talk about too much/too little regulation but *different* regulations. Just for the last one, if you open an e-shop in Europe you need to account for all diferent VAT percentages in every country. Do you want to open a mill in an EU country (not your own, I'll take for a given that you know your own country's legal system)? Now you need to know about its labour laws, probably you'll need to incorporate there with its own set of laws and regulations. Do you want to trade-mark/patent something? You'd better go and do it on each and every country. Do you collect your users' data? You'd better know each and every country privacy law's petty details, etc.
All this has become better in the last, say, 10~15 years but it is still nightmarish.
"Now not to sound like a bat crazy right winger."
Still you do.
And my bet is that the closest you have been to Europe is Fox News.
"A. Europe isn't (as) unified a market as the USA.
[...]
B. Venture capital. More specifically series B and C of funding. It is so much easier to get $30 million from VCs in the US than it is in Europe."
These two things are one and the same: you won't get such kind of money because you don't have reach to a market big enough to justify the investment at a low enough risk level. Creating a company with a viable product/service out of thin air is difficult and, therefore, financing it quite risky, but having then to jump it to a dozen different countries and do it fast enough that competition don't kill you in the meantime becomes at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
"A lot of people in Europe speak English as a second language. The language thing is less of a barrier than people make it out to be"
Well, standard wisdom will say it *is* a tremendous barrier, specifically for the kind of global reach business that this story is about. You certainly will *not* get any significant market penetration in Spain if you don't go Spanish, or in Italy if you don't go Italian, or French in France, etc. But, hey, don't let the fact that nobody has managed to develop a hugh roots market in a single language in EU before stop you. After all, what looks like a showstopper for most people can be an oportunity for the visionary.
But you are certainly right on a thing: it is not language which is the real barrier, it is having like two dozen different sovereign countries within, with his different laws, trademarks, bureaucracies, etc. Sum all these barriers of entry and you'll understand why is so much difficult for a business in EU to "explode" from start-up to billion-euro company with the speed and frequency it can happen in USA.
"It turns out, however, that we all just handed the power over to different middlemen who now use more sophisticated tools to squeeze the artist back to a position of bare survival."
As it came to a surprise.
This has been, more or less, a capitalist market (quite so, since it was a novelty). Even Adam Smith knew that leaving capitalism alone, it is the land owners the ones that extract the most rent, with farmers being left at the point of bare survival. Here the public is the land the author nurtures via her books -and the public nowadays is owned by Amazon. The more free market tools are thrown to me mixture, the more certain this kind of output is to be.
"That makes the difference between those who can do a job, and those who are really good at it."
But still, as you say, you need to encourage it.
"The latter are rare to find."
Not only because good professionals at any trade are difficult to find (after all, no matter the average, the top performers are always a tiny minority), but because that's not what people look for.
It's difficult to defend oneself as being a 'jack of all trades, master of no one', when the one making the hirings specifically looks for something "with two years experience on, say, VMWare 5.0" instead of "virtualization servers and IaaS". No wonder the prospective employees specialize in being good at what the employers are looking for: tools instead of principles.
"Because the majority of blank media is not used to copy music, this would be similar to all drivers paying an "illegal road use" tax on gasoline because a tiny minority transport "copyrighted" goods on the roads without permission from the copyright holder."
The fact that is done that way (taxing blank media) and that it is not related to "taxation without representation" doesn't mean I agree with it.
First, the industry rationale: you pay the tax on the blank media because you are not paying for the *use* of the blank media to copy music, but for the *right* to do so independently if you in fact make use of that right or not. The tax then is supposedly calculated as a fraction of the total cost (so, say, if only 10% of blank media is used to copy music, the tax per support is only 10% of the "cost" of a copy).
Of course, this is a poor argument for what is in fact a powerful lobby keeping its cake and eating it too: on one hand, they have perverted the law because it is not about the "right" given by the copyright holders to me so I can make a private copy, but about the *privilege* I as a common man give to copyright holders of cultural makings to favour their industry (you can see this looking at how these kind of laws have changed their wording in the last 10 to 15 years). On the other hand, under a honest rationale, your conclusion is obvious: not all blank media -not even a majority of it, is used to copy music, so one should think if there's any other, more to the point, way to compensate copyright holders, which clearly is: in order for you to copy something, there *must* be an original to copy it from; that's the 'conditio sine qua non' so, the obvious output would be to tax the originals sold by the media industry. This way, it would also automatically make for the "formula" they use to calculate the compensation, which is returned in proportion to sellings. This would be the right thing to do, but then the industry would feel they might be losing sales, since the originals they sell would be a bit more expensive. And since this is not about rights but about extracting money from society -no matter if diserved or not, they press governments for this not to happen.
And the final example about how industry is not interested in rights but in siphoning money their way: they recieve the tax but still they try to use DRM so you can't exercise the right you are paying for. In other countries, they have been able to get the tax and still make illegal most cases of private copy.
"Aren't all the NTP servers subordinate to the Naval Observatory Clock anyway?"
No.
"Typically when dealing with NTP you do not want big swings."
A second is not a "big swing" in general computation parlance. People working on near-RT systems already know -or should know, how to cope with leap seconds.
"In fact, a system using NTP that's too far out of sync, won't sync back up correctly."
Five to fifteen seconds at least. We are talking a different league, almost a different sport here.
"I work with Avaya voice equipment and we've been warning people about this for months and months. We've provided instructions on several methods to ensure this doesn't cripple your system"
Maybe the problem is that those Avaya systems should be able to cope with leap seconds on their own without having to warn and provide instructions.
"with some of the platforms, it will literally cripple the system."
Fill a bug and solve it.
"In America, we pay gas taxes on roads. But if you buy gasoline to use with your farm vehicles YOU DON'T PAY ROAD TAXES. It's dyed red and tax free."
In EU, we pay gas taxes on roads. But if you buy gasoline to use with your farm vehicles YOU DON'T PAY ROAD TAXES.. It's dyed red and tax free.
As I already told to Snufu, "And you don't seem to notice the difference between apples and oranges, so what?".
"So in some European countries you already pay a royalty to music companies on all blank media regardless of the intended use?"
Yes.
"Does the Red Cross pay music company royalties on the blank SSDs in their new laptops?"
Yes.
"Do researchers at the large hadron collider pay a music royalty on the blank USB drives used to store their data?"
Don't know but it is not relevant since the LHC is in Switzerland, which is not an EU country.
"Do individuals pay music company royalties for the blank SD card used in their personal cameras?"
Yes.
"You guys still haven't figured out this taxation without representation thing."
And you don't seem to notice the difference between apples and oranges, so what?
"This is a violation of EU regulations, where, if such copying is allowed, there must be compensation from government."
Not from government. There should be compensation, full stop. Neither who pays for it nor up to what amount are pre-set.
But, hey, would you think EU legislators would rise to the obvious conclusion of charging a levvy on sold copies which are, by definition, the 'conditio sine qua non' to have anything to apply the private copy right to start with? Oh, no, of course not: they either pay in bulk with government money or they'll apply a levvy to blank supports.
Yes, you know...
Storm in English Channel. Europe isolated.
"In many situations, you can use L'Hopital's Rule to resolve 0/0.
No, you can't."
Yes you can.
"At least any mathematician will look at you with disgust if you claim that"
No mathematician will look at you with disgust by claiming that. Armchair wannabes, on the other hand...
Because any mathematician will know this is about programing, an algorithm context and, therefore, *in many situations* 0/0 will be a context case of f(x)/g(x) as both functions' independent variable approach zero, so a limit, that is, the very scenario L'Hopital's rule applies to.
There will be, of course, many other situations where this will not be the case, a thing both the mathematician and the parent poster are also well aware of.
"Can anybody think of any reason any user would ever need full SSN data?"
Can anybody think of any valid reason why USA insists for an ID, as the SSN is, to be taken for a password?
There shouldn't have to be any more problem knowing your SSN than knowing you are silas_moeckel.
"How do you come by these observations without surplus labor?"
No way at all since I never challenged such assertion.
I challenged the assertion that "Prior to the 20th century land was cheap or often free". That's why I higlighted it and that was the one I was answering to.
I also challenge your -new to the argument, assert that USA had any large labour surplus due to industralization -that was the case in Europe, though, and I also say that the only notable case of overall labour surplus in the USA, the Great Depresion, was not due to industralization taking jobs away but because of capital speculation.
"If the AI is not concerned with it'a own survival it isn't "self aware"."
Good you wrote that in conditional form: it makes obvious that if your "if" is wrong, then anything you build out from it goes through the wastepipe.
Now, please, explain to me how kamikazes, just to name the more obvious counter-example, were not self-aware.
"I think its clear that my comments were solely focused on the EU/US"
Yes, it was clear. That's why I made a point about the issue not being US centric. Less so given that the parent article (impact of a future "true" AI) makes no sense except on a global context. Anyway, land being cheap/free can't be any more far from true *specifically* in good ol'Europe if that's what your comment was focused on.
"and that conversations in general on this website are US-centric."
Some people repeating this meme once and again won't make it any more true. It's been years since Slashdot, despite being based in USA, goes far beyond that scope.
"And the basis of this thread implies the progress of capitalist systems"
Which, again, is much more a global issue than USA. Capitalism wasn't born in USA, while USA is probably the best example of its evolution, and basically no current macro-level socio-economic issue can be considered but globally. Can you, say, even start considering USA IT market without taking outsourcing into account, or USA consumerism trends without cheap Asian electronics?
"during this previous period was subject to similar labor pressures as those that will occur if robotics and software create a large excess of labor."
I'm sorry but I have to say again "bollocks". Accepting your USA-centric premise, USA has had only one period of significative labour force surplus and that had nothing to do with industriual revolution nor land avaliability: it was in the thirties due to the Great Depression, which was a purelly capital-driven bluff -you know the results.
Now, please note that I agree with your general argument: people has problems just lying down and starving to death, and yes I concede that there were in the past security valves that made things a bit easier (migration movements). It's only I disagree with your arguments' formulation which are only valid for USA, and only partly, not the world at large. Even in USA, wars have much more saying on the country's economic evolution than land ownership or migrational movements.
Even migration movements don't equate to free/cheap land but -you yourself suggest that, to labour forces. Hordes of Europeans didn't migrate to USA because of cheap land but because labour or social (due to European wars) demand: for the most part, immigrants didn't become landowners but workers.
"you've taken to argue with me because I haven't considered the Roman army, who apparently were able to give out 20acre/man to hundreds of thousands of soldiers because land was expensive and unavailable."
No, it is not that you forgot that, you are building a strawman. The argument is that you can go as far in the past as the Roman Empire and you won't find a period when land was cheap/free, not at least in Europe.
By the way, they where more in the thousands than in the hundreds of thousands but still, a fruitful argument for our current situation can be taken from that: that of artificial scarcity. One way or the other it took as much as 20 years of labour to earn a piece of land large enough to secure your retirement because of powerful forces wanting it that way. These kind of forces limiting access to sources of wealth are still in play, it's only it's not the emperor.
So it is not AI taking out jobs, it's our capitalist socioeconomic organization failing at distributing wealth as it is created.
"When machines can do all the work, money becomes obsolete."
Humm... no.
Money is a handy referent for wealth measure and there's no indication that there won't be differential wealth accruance just because machines do all the work.
For the most part of History "machines" already did all the work (just understand "slaves" or "serfs" being synonims to "machines"). Did that mean money was of no use back then? I mean, even among the "real people", not the "machines".
"This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about."
No, "we" don't get the dreamt leisure society if "we" happen to be in the "unnecessary people set that died".
"The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small"
Bullshit. It is capitalism the one being "too small", not the world. Come back to tell me the world can't support us once capitalism stops destroying crops in the thousands of millions of kilograms just to preserve itself. You migth have an argument then.
"You outnumber the 1%'ers literally 99 to 1."
We outnumber Usain Bolt literally billions to one. Can you name someone running faster than him? It is not about the numbers but about the proper numbers. And regarding *raw* numbers, 99% are less than 2:1 to 1% regarding wealth accrual. Still an advantage but one that has been severily reduced in the last decades and looks like it's going to be reduced even more.
"In a democracy, no less."
And after we talked about raw numbers, then we need to qualify them. No, it is not a democracy, it is a *representative* democracy. Those that control the representation, control the outcome. And these are the 1%, not the 99%. And the 1% have quite a different vision of the world than the 99% (see i.e.: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/16/8...).
"If you cant manage to out fight or out vote them, then you deserve the shitty country you live in."
You know this is as stupid as it can be, right along with "if you can't defend yourself, you diserve to be raped", do you?
"Signed - Rest of the world."
I'm part of that "rest of the world": don't put yourself as if your idiotic arguments somehow represented me.