As automation lowers the cost of producing goods toward zero, a smaller wage should buy more goods and living standards can improve even as wages go down.

(Of course, this whole discussion is silly because automation is as limited as anything else. But if you believe in automation replacing almost everyone, then you have to also accept that it will drastically cut the costs of goods.)

Otherwise it's potentially just a matter of inserting a tiny reprogramable USB stick when there are few cashiers on and the cashier who is on isn't looking for a few seconds (ie two people walking into a Staples store can pull this off really easily).

Indeed, so much this.

I've seen open USB ports on all sorts of POS terminals and it just boggles my mind, especially because I've been in industrial environments in small companies where hot-gluing USB ports shut is a matter of course.

You can buy a USB flash drive that sits almost flush and if you take a little bit of elbow-grease and sandpaper, you can get it to sit flush easily.

So I don't see how big companies like Staples, who have the actual budget to look at security this way, don't even bother to do the basics like this. It's time we start fining/class action lawsuit-ing firms that don't even do the least bit of security, with amounts of money that actually hurt and not take "5 minutes of profits" to pay.

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BMO

Back in the early 90s I had the opportunity of participating on a paleontological expedition to the badlands of Montana. The soil was built up over hundreds of millions of years and flooding cut through the soft soil leaving a stratigraphy that is dramatic and easy to read. You can even see the Chicxulub ejecta, a chocolate brown horizontal line about the width of your hand.

Now whole dinosaur skeletons are a rare find. You can spend a whole season tramping through the badlands and never find two bones that go together. But individual bones are more common, and bone fragments are more common still, and experts can often identify the group of dinosaurs or even the species of dinosaur a bone fragment came from, often a surprisingly small fragment of bone.

What we were doing was assembling a database of species found by layer, which in turn maps to era. What the PI was finding was a shift towards species with anatomical adaptations to deal with heat. His opinion was that there was already a climate driven adaptive stress on the dinosaur population, which turned the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact into a knock-out blow.

So the idea that there was more going on than an asteroid impact is hardly new. People were thinking that way twenty years ago.

I would have thought that full automation is a demonstration that the exact opposite is true?

I think that your friend is, at best, misinformed. At worst he's lying.

There has been discussion through the years of this sort of thing being possible in the future, but it has not yet happened. Cars simply require too much service for there to be the option of not opening for service-configuration.

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

But now that they denied involvement, I suspect they may be.

I'm not sure how that is an argument for artificially keeping people unemployed between now and whatever distant future you imagine. Wages could be higher if non-wage costs associated with employing someone or doing business were lower -- of course this depends on the supply of people to do the job.

Is there really an argument against considering changes to laws to help employers employ people?

Yes, but if the underside of the car needs to be accessed to make a battery swapout easy, then being able to drive over the swap pit, so the tech underneath can do the job, then drive out and continue on one's trip will be similar to fueling up, or possibly even faster.

Maybe we should re-examine every law, regulation, and employer mandate that makes it more expensive or more risky to hire people or conduct business that would employ people?