You don't need to have a monopoly to have anti-trust actions brought against you.

3) The car in front of you has ABS and you do not (or just vastly superior braking.

4 - and what might be the case with the Google car) The car in front of you acts in such a way that it signals that it will keep going, then stops.

For instance, a car that accelerates, then stomps on the brakes is more likely to be rear-ended then one that just stomps on the breaks. See also, the "swoop and squat" technique used by people who intentionally engineer collisions for insurance.

Nah, FB makes money. That $60M was probably generated outside the US. Therefore it cannot* be brought home, and must be spent on foreign acquisitions.

* Of course it can be, companies are just betting if they accumulate enough outside-the-US wealth, they'll get another "bring it home" tax exemption/tax holiday.

Huh, the harvester combine is a late industrial revolution invention... one that brought the industrial revolution to farming. Far after it came to textiles and such.

I'm asking what the information revolution is supposed to mean... a term that, by-the-by predates 3dprinters, 6 axis cnc and reprogrammable robots on the floor.

The maker revolution (or whatever rapid prototyping means) seems like, once costs for scale normalize to traditional manufacturing, will obviously change things dramatically.

But still, please answer my question about whether you think in 300 years, people will accept inherited ownership of, say 50% of manufacturing means like that.

That's exactly what the summary says.

And why the US government should get all anti-trust on them.

I said taxes were compatible with captialism, but not communism. And often unnecessary in socialism. But, you know, go on avoiding the issue.

"just because you're using a harvesting combine instead of 1000 day laborers... nothing has really changed."...

See, and in that case, nothing really has changed. I mean, on the surface, sure. But someone built those harvesting combines. So, it still takes a ton of people to do agriculture. That's like a direct "Wealth of Nations" example

3d printers (not the shitty plastic ones), cnc machines (been around for awhile but the five and six axis ones are game changers), dynamic desktop refineries, factory robots that can be reprogrammed in minutes without requiring to retool the entire assembly line... really a tediously long list of things that upsets the previous paradigm.

Well, one, those currently cost several orders of magnitude more than mass producing injected molded plastic. So you pay a price for that flexability in a real way. The ones that are cheaper when automated are often less flexable than human beings are.

But second, when technology evolves further, and that's no longer the case, that's the exact point that people are making about "robots taking all the menial jobs" and "the need to share this wealth". Look at it like this. Say, in 300 years. Are people really going to accept that JoeSchmo is worth whatever the future equivalent of 50 billion because his great-great-great-great-grandfather managed to buy one of the first best robots? And therefore, JoeSchmo has inherited like half the robot factories in America?

There's no reason to believe robots will be the first exception to the rule.

Of course there is. The other technologies you cited multiply the productivity of a human being. Robots allow the complete replacement of a human being. That is, non-robot output is O(N), N = number of humans employed. But there's no reason to expect robot-output not to be O(1), given a minimal level of humans to program them.

how would seven billion humans earn a living if not for all the technologies that created exponentially more jobs?

Well, leaving aside you're using population, not workforce, they're not now.

I was under the impression that incomes across the board have risen.

In absolute numbers on currency.. sure because of inflation. But in purchasing power or equivalent bushels of corn or something, no. In fact, it's been declining at the low end for a while.

Good. If the end goal of economic growth isn't universal unemployment, what the hell is it?

It's probably the other departments' inferior results instead of a money saving solution.

And reducing the deficit a microgram would we worthless. First, literally, a microgram of US currency at the highest distributed denomination is literally a rounding error from a rounding error from penny. But more importantly, the government can and should buy useful things.

The NSA has a couple of departments. One wants to secure computers. The other to break in. Thankfully, because they are different fiefdoms, we can get actual information on how to secure things from that one group.

And yeah, the NSA can access pretty much any information it wants on me already. Why would it even want to waste it's time looking at my computer. They know more about me than my computer does.

Screw all those other people outside that great big giant wall we have that separates us from the rest of the world!!

in the US we call that the Atlanta and Pacific oceans.

Redistributing wealth arbitrarily is distinct from socialism/communism in what way?

On the off chance that you were serious: What you are calling "redistributing wealth" is accomplished via a government program, and can be funded by taxes. Taxes are paid by people in a capitalist system... in fact, taxes are often an alternative to socialism/communism. In communism, there is no private property with which to pay taxes. In socialism, the government owns, and makes money via running/renting the means of production. Therefore, redistribution is in no way tied intrinsically to communism any more than it is intrinsically tied to capitalism.

The industrial revolution is being eaten alive by the information revolution

What does this even mean? I've heard strange things like this before, but it always seems to really mean "hey, there are computers involved now!" If feels like the economic analytic equivalent of a patent of "doing something... on the Internet!"

I know that was his political goal. I want to know why he doesn't favor making the current richest guy dictator (or the richest oligarchs) in total control of all means of production. You know, Soviet-style control.

Because that seems to be what the actual solution he would actually arrive at if he were to try to solve the problem as he stated it.

. I've yet to see a (radically different) proposal for a process for choosing who chooses who the best-and-brightest are better then the feedback-driven system we have today.

Well, if we're using evidence, the US federal government's green energy startup fund was really good at their job. Yeah, Solyndra failed, but it was the only large failure. And dozens others succeeded. That's a ratio that most private sector investors could not match.