You are quite right. The savings in labor are then passed right along to the consumer who uses it to hire the worker doing some other task which cannot be robot automated as easily, such as, to give a trivial example, baby sitting.

That's the history of capitalism. You don't seem to believe on it, so I take it you are a Marxist.

Perhaps so in the US, but the world just happen to be a smidgen larger than that. So your point is rather irrelevant.

This quote already shows you do not know what you are talking about. Currently so much money is sitting in central banks rather than stocks that several countries have overnight negative interest rates.

Thanks for providing ready confirmation of your ignorance. No less than the IMF has studied and found cases of multipliers greater than one in the recent crisis along with many other economists from the left and from the right.

I'm not about to educate you out of your ignorance, so I'm signing off from this discussion

Sorry but your chosen baseline year, viz. 1940 makes the whole comparison moot. The world was just coming out of the great depression and entering a global war. Why don't you compare 1975 with 2015 instead?

In this case government collection is up only 20% over the last forty years.

which in turn is beaten by Haiti which has an even lower minimum wage....

[citation needed]

This is particularly the case today when most money is seating idle in bank accounts and treasury bonds.

This is just no so. If you had said "you price a smidgen of labor out you would be correct as studies seem to agree that this is the case.

Lastly you need to read about money multipliers and it being possibly larger than 1 in some instances such as this.

Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity. In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.

Currently believed to be about 4%, but it does heavily depend on human behavior. To wit, when we need deflation humans do not like to explicitly reduce wages, they would much rather simply not give you a pay increase and let inflation erode your wages away.

Because of this we need 4% inflation rather than the 2% inflation target proposed nearly two decades ago, which had ignored this all too human variable.

Which any reasonable person would say he delivered on, considering that we had nearly a quarter of a million troops there and we are down to about 10K.

If you care about the facts that is. Otherwise keep on voting for those "fiscally responsible" republicans which took the Clinton surplus and converted it into a trillion dollar deficit, all in the name of "smaller government".

This. Say what you will of Democrats, at least they run on the policies they will implement. Republicans on the other hand run on a con job of "free market" and "no deficits" which in reality means "corporate welfare up the wazoo" and "record deficits because of wars and tax cuts".

Wow, Yahoo was there before Google. Who knew. What else are you going to discover next? that Altavista was there also before Google?

And no, Yahoo was not making money in 1995. It went public in April 1996 with revenues of $1.9 million (yes with an m) for the nine month period ending on December 1995. It had a loss of $634K for that same time frame.

I'm deadly serious. Every search engine company before Google lost money hand over fist. In fact as late as 2001 or 2002 Google was still loosing money on the web search engine side.

So you would have told the Google guys, Larry and Sergei, how every single search engine company before them failed, since they couldn't monetize their search. You would have walked all smug from that meeting, having shown the "powers-that-be" how ignorant they were of the past, thinking that search engines or even page rank (independently discovered in Altavista, who failed) would make a difference.

Gosh, you just said one of the things I dislike the most about the old timers. They tried something, they failed at it, and the conclusion they bring to the table is unpossible!

To be sure, by all means yes, I want to hear about what went wrong the last time around, but one failed attempt does not prove much.

As I remind them every time, the real lesson they bring is that, if we were to do exactly what you did, back at that moment in time, we would fail... likely.

Instead I refocus the meeting on whether it really is different this time around: has technology evolved? the market place matured? are we architecting the solution differently? better team? etc. /rant

Normally it would, but this includes OEM installed Windows 7 copies as well as site wide licenses that ran without a hitch for years. Searching on the web one can find reports of this happening to other people. Running the authentication tool is of no use. It really points to a glitch on the Microsoft side.

Bzzt, wrong. The last ANSI approved version of C is C99, which includes // as a comment delimiter.