"France fails at having an Internationally competitive workforce."

Good for them. In the race to the bottom, France's "failure" sounds more fun than being the winner.

I don't think opinions on this sort of subject are all that amenable to change. Obama looked at the numbers, and said what he thought would help him stay in office.

A lot of chest beating going on here, a lot of flexing of consumer muscles, and talk of the righteous boycotting of bigots. From the outside however, it just looks like a pitchfork wielding mob, using coercion to bend a third party to their will.
People don't like seeing coercion, especially by groups who have no accountability to anyone, and I believe that the result of these protests will be a decrease in public's sympathy for equality of rights for gay people.

I think it's likely that Zuckerberg knows that Facebook is preposterously overvalued, that the market will realise this, and is diversifying into some other areas with massive future growth while the going is good. Perhaps they'll create a virtual world communication type thing. I don't think this is too bad a development.

I suppose some people are so unwilling to take the time to learn, or to do something properly, that there's always a ready market for a stupid device to make it "easier". It doesn't work. What do a load of flashing LEDs, (controlled by a smartphone, what else) add beyond what printed chord charts, or guitar tab provide? It's exactly the same information.

Instead, why not spend that $400 on an acoustic guitar (you can get a really good one for that money), and practice putting your fingers on the right strings and frets, forming the chords, practice picking or strumming, and KEEP DOING IT, again and again, every day until you can form the shapes instantly. Your brain will learn, and your fingers will get sore, but that goes away. It takes time, but at the end you've learned a real skill. Imagine how proud you'll feel, you've got that skill for life - the ability to play songs, entertain friends. It's well worth the effort.

Don't piss about with some gadget that promises to let you skip all the hard work. They don't work, never have and never will.

That is *A* solution, but not a very good one. Why don't we reduce the human population to zero, and completely solve the problem?

No one has tried such a thing - indeed it wouldn't work today. You missed this section of my post:

"once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies"

The time will come when machines can organise things better than people can. That's already the case in some situations, and it will become more and more common (as in the frequently referenced "Manna" story, by Marshall Brain). When this happens, a lot of the population will not be economically useful. As in, way more than half. At the same time, production efficiency will be high enough that they could be supported to an ever higher standard. I'm suggesting that that ought to happen.

Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).

The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?

I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.

As you say, headers are useful when using libraries. But why not have the compiler generate the headers itself, or perhaps the library creation utility? IMHO if something is a deterministic one to one copy of something else, then there's no reason to force a human to copy it out by hand.

I don't disagree with you that we will ultimately be better off as a society - but to get there, we'll need to rethink some basic tenets of society. Fewer people will be economic contributors. The social safety net, which has steadily expanded over the last hundred years, will need to expand much more. However, hopefully the enhanced production that new technology allows will enable us to afford it.

Once they can pass a Turing test, they can do anyone's job. They don't need to be able to do anything close to that in order to render a large swathe of the lesser skilled members of the workforce unemployable.

This obstruction isn't in an area historically known as "Hobb's end" is it?

They don't care about being virtuous, I can promise you that. They're angry, and they're jealous. Now I grant you, those aren't particularly admirable emotions, but if people like them stop your corporate bus one day, I don't think sneering will get you very far.

But what happens when it transpires that the "labour saving devices" are better than you at literally everything that has economic value? What do you do then?

We don't know who these people are, or their backgrounds - so it seems rather trite to sneer at their protest.The earning power of Google's brilliant tech professionals has swept them aside. Is it surprising they have something to say about it? And they are only the first small drops from the stormclouds. Robotics and automation constitute a rising tide that will engulf more and more low-skill jobs - and not just those either. What will most people do when there is no prospect of them getting any employment?