We can't pay poor people a few bucks to eat, but we've infinite cash for surveillance and war. Who the hell is threatening us with chemicals? The US had THE stockpiles of nerve toxins on this planet. We still haven't gotten rid of it all. And for what did we make enough poison to wipe out all life on earth a million times? We seem to be the biggest threat on the planet, by far.

Or don't pay your condo association fees for a month. Or homeowners association fees. They can confiscate.

There's no place in the world you can live where a bastard can't figure out a legal way to steal your home. Never was. Government or private. Remember the hundreds of thousands of faked refinance agreements that banks and capital groups used to steal people's homes in the last ten years? Got clean away with it. Kept the houses, too. We can't touch them anymore. Red handed, and they walked away with tiny fines.

The only defense against thieves? Live somewhere they don't want to live, or where they can't figure a way to rent your property for a good price. This is the new Gilded Age, and the bastards are just getting warmed up. We're gonna see what supercapital trillionaires are capable of in our lifetimes.

Nope. They won't. Renters are peons. No leverage. The leverage is money. Too many rich people, too many trust funds. Better for the landlords (capital funds will buy up the good units very soon now) to evict and replace with more affluent renters - or even better, write some new laws so the landlords can rent the units out at AirBnB prices themselves. Why not?

Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.

Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.

Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.

Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.

Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)

End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.

You missed on education. Cuirrently at least some schools require that the students have internet access to get assignments. Possibly for other reasons, I don't have a kid in school now, but a friend does, and here daughter is required to get her school assignments over the internet. Actually over the javascript web. I didn't ask whether Flash was required.

You are making assumptions about their goals.

The US legal system derives from the British which, since the Magna Charta, has been about ensuring that nobody who is powerful enough to overthrow the government wouldn't lose more than they would gain by doing so. So the courts attempt to provide a veneer of justice while actually finding in favor of those with the most power, including wealth as a form of power. They don't always do that, but that's always the way to bet. The problem is you don't always know all the players.

Please note: I believe that the Civil Rights movement was fostered by the Dixiecrats repeatedly flouting the desires of the Democratic party, and voting with the Republicans. That's not the way it looked on the ground, and there were easy justifications based around equity, and popular mores, but those had been ignored for nearly a century. OTOH, another factor was a bulge in the population in the early 20's, when people tend to act more idealistically and without fully counting costs. So it's not all for one reason.

Well, passing the Turing test may be further away than I suggested, after all, many people have failed the Turing test.

The thing about corporations is that the same people can be the corporate officers of more than one corporation...and if I understand correctly, a corporation is enough of a person to be one of those officers. So the AI could go "sponsor shopping".

Given our conservative legislative system, I don't see AIs being given personhood through special legislation within the current century, but getting it by being a corporation seems already possible. And If I've got my legal theories correct (dubious) once you get three AIs, they can elect each other to be their own corporate officers, so you have something vaguely resembling a "bottom-up family" where you CAN choose your relatives.

If I understand recent studies on the placebo effect correctly, you don't need to deceive your customers (though that may make it more effective).

But if I'm reading my history correctly, the distinction between existing in the mind and existing in the physical world was not as clear when the term was created. Ghost and geist (as in zeitgeist) are clearly from the same root, and probably originally meant the same thing. Casper, etc., is NOT the traditional meaning of ghost, but merely a perversion created by Hollywood.

Seriously trying meant if I didn't win enough to buy a meal I wouldn't have any food for the next 12 hours. So I really wanted to win. (I had a Greyhound bus ticket to get home, and that was it, besides the quarter. I'd been a bit foolish about how I spent money earlier, but gambling wasn't involved.)

Please note, since we are talking about parapsycology, gambling schemes are out of context. But I really wanted to win, and that's in context.

OTOH, it's also clearly not statistically significant.

Please notice that there is no evidence that Google did or said anything. This story is pure speculation about why Eich resigned. Plausible, but not convincing.

FWIW, I could make up an equally substantiated story that it was because he was clearly affiliaated with the council of Boskone. It might not be as plausible or as conviincing, but it would have as much evidence in support of it.

What about marrying their robot? This year that's clearly silly. Ditto for next year. Ten years from now? Probably still silly. Twenty years from now? Well....

When AIs are close to human equivalent (and how close is needed) they will need to be able to sign contracts. That might be the distinction, except that it's likely that AIs will gain rights by being incorporated, and thus have them because they are corporations. This is a lot different than the current Japanese life-sized doll. But how is it different from 3M...outside of locality and reaction time?

The problem then becomes various things that traditionally go along with civil union. E.g. health insurance. Divorce. Liability for debts. etc.

It's not that these things couldn't be solved, it's that there is no simple way for them to be solved en-mass.

Are you talking about String Theory?

Pretty much, perhaps slightly more trustworthy than more established religions. But don't believe the origin myths. There's no evidence that modern witchcraft much predates the Golden Dawn society. (There are isolated witches who claim a family tradition that is older. Perhaps they are correct, or some of them are correct. Much of modern Wicca derives from the Alexandrine tradition, which is recent.)

OTOH, origin myths don't have much to do with validity...whatever that means when applied to a religion. The Wicca are generally trying to create a religion that is harmonious with the way people naturally think, and which doesn't promulgate harm. So far they seem to have done better than most "Christian" denominations. Possibly *because* they are more recent and relatively powerless.