People work more because they want more, they see that shiny new Iphone as a necessity rather than a privilege.

You really believe everyone secretly covets an iPhone?

I saw a 12 year old kid playing with his iPhone. You think he had to go to work to get it?

You didn't address the most important point I made: Why should everyone be expected to work? By making the "labor participation rate" an important indicator, that's what we're saying. What we're told we should have is 100% employment. Unfortunately, three year-olds aren't really good for a whole lot of productivity.

So I'll repeat myself, just for you: What happens when all the goods and services we want no longer require 70% of the population to work? Or 50%? Or 30%? What happens to the rest? Either we figure out as a society how those people are going to live or... I don't want to think about the alternative.

Pray tell me how many parapsychologists are Nobel laureates?

Barack Obama is a Nobel laureate.

Henry Kissenger is a Nobel laureate.

Fritz Haber is a Nobel laureate.

Al Gore is a Nobel laureate.

António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz is a Nobel laureate.

You know who loves giving economists awards? Economists.

I put it to you that the greater the education of women, the lower the birthrate. So bringing this world countries up to 1st world standards of living will, if it includes education, resolve the birthrate issue. Sex isn't the issue, birthrate is

There is not enough available engineer/it/programmers to deploy (let alone create) systems to replace 1/3 of all jobs in 10 years.

Well, duh. They'll have robots doing the engineering/programming.

Then we'll see some whining neckbeards like you wouldn't believe.

I want a whitebox robot that I can then glue bits on through a PCI type interface equivalent and make it a factory robot, a hospital robot, or an agricultural robot.

Glue some hair on it and give me a Scarlet Johansson robot, OK?

In a fair business environment it would probably have been the case..... :)

Geez, I'd hope that by now it would be at least OS/9.

...would be running on more computers than all other operating systems combined by, IIRC, 2003.

Hey, it's a Warped World!

http://youtu.be/z2cYd6dxj7w

Another name for "crony capitalism" is "capitalism".

which means people of the future will be doing other tasks.

Yes. Cleaning the homes of people who own factories.

What happens when we get to a point where we just don't need everyone to work in order to provide the goods and services people want? I'm thinking we may have already reached that point in some developed countries. Then what?

Unless we're prepared to have some big (and forced) reductions in populations, we had better get comfortable with larger welfare states.

I always get bothered when I hear politicians and pundits talk about "labor participation rates". Until the 1960s, we had much lower labor participation rates in the US. Families were able to get by and make progress only having one person in the family working full time. Today, if you're a stay-at-home parent you are counted as "out of the labor force" and politicians will use you as a statistic for why the economy is bad. But that's an ass-backward way of looking at it. If we had a good economy, we'd be able to thrive on a much lower labor participation rate. I mean, what are we talking about here. If someone in 1980 had told me that in the 21st century we'd all have to work harder, for longer hours, and longer into our lives in order to survive, I would have thought they were crazy. But that's where they're at.

Productivity is at record levels, but everyone has to work harder and longer. Does that really make sense to anyone but a "free market conservative"?

The question mark was missing from the link.

https://www.google.com/search?...

Citation as to the fact that both companies are big boys who can make business deals without our help, or as to Level3 saying the traditional "sender pays" rule is proper? For the latter, here are a few thousand references:

https://www.google.com/searchq...

Except a decade ago, you got 95% on a powerful desktop computer. Today you get 95% on a cellphone.

If I sit in a quiet room, and enunciate carefully, with slight pauses between words, I can get way better than 95%. Also, if voice recognition is integrated with a camera focused on the speaker's face, accuracy can go way up.

Your conspiracy theory is backwards. If they had a vested interest in more automation, they would want to keep it low profile. The worst thing they could do is rile up the people that are losing their jobs, or watching their wages shrink.

Yet almost all of those unfed and unclothed people live in countries that are not liberal, and most of them live in countries that are not capitalist, or were not capitalist in the recent past. Meanwhile, the top countries by per capita GDP, and by income equality, are liberal, capitalist democracies.

If liberalism, capitalism, and automation were the cause of poverty, then America, Western Europe, and Japan would be starving, while Afghanistan, Liberia, and Somalia would be on top.

> Verizon decided they wanted a piece of the action, and degraded service. It's been shown that it was intentional, and not the result of insufficient hardware.

Level3 and Verizon both disagree with you. They both agree that the 7 interconnect routers became saturated as the Netflix traffic increased, and both have published diagrams explaining it for laymen. Links are below. Anyone,who knows how to use traceroute can confirm that fact. The only question is whether Netflix or Level3 will pay to upgrade that connection.

http://publicpolicy.verizon.co...

http://blog.level3.com/open-in...

Whether Netflix is using Verizon as an ISP or if they are peers is of course the crux of their dispute. Looking at the definition of "peer" in the dictionary, they don't seem to meet the definition.