C is very beginner friendly in my opinion. It was my first non-BASIC language. Learning C you learn how those bits and bytes work and how shit gets done. The paradigm is old but not obsolete.

C is not beginner friendly. The reason is that it's not a managed language, so a mistake will have unpredictable consequences, rather than firing an exception like in Java. Yes, you can still do it; I learned C by reverse engineering Nethack sources in pre-Internet days and debugging all errors with printfs ("got here!") and logic, and perhaps that should be the criteria for serious programmers, but that's hardly "beginner friendly".

Personally, I think programmers should start with with line-number Basic, then move to procedural programming, then to object-oriented. You can't really understand a paradigm unless you know the problem it was designed as a response for.

That's not the correct use of the word "coercion", and it's a misuse that indicates a bias regarding economic policy. Coercion indicates the use of force or threat of force by one against another. A person in the wilderness must work or die, and no other person is there to coerce him to work.

You do realize that the entire point of civilization is to make things different from being alone in the wilderness, right? So if they aren't, then the civilization has failed miserably. Also, the conditions in wilderness are not under anyone's control, while the conditions in civilization are.

And I absolutely have a "bias" regarding economic policty: I believe economy exists to serve human needs and as such must address not just efficiency, but also fairness and security. Our current economy fails with all three.

Right, because automation causes poverty.

Not automation, but automation combined with free market fundamentalism. The former causes disturbances in economy and the latter prevents efficient safety nets to ensure proper maintenance of human resources who's primary supply of income gets cut by them. This combination makes the economy extremely fragile, both because the resulting lack of flexibility but also because people compensate by overreacting to any negative signal.

That is why countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, that wisely avoided the "productivity catastrophe", are doing well, while countries adopting automation, like America, Europe, and Japan, are starving.

United States is starving. Europe makes do with filthy socialism and Japan with the remnants of feudalism. But don't worry, you've succesfully propagandized about the wonders of austerity, so it's unlikely that Europe will rise from depression any time soon.

Workers are lazy and will not produce if they don't have to.

Thank you for being honest about capitalism being based on coercion, disguised as it might be. However, the issue is precisely that we're running out of work that needs to - or even profitably can - be performed by humans, so what's the problem?

Sounds awfully like feminism or progressivism to me.

They can become religions, certainly. Progressivism has a built-in sense of destiny - a divine plan - and feminism began as a demand for more just world and developed a weird cult-like fringe later.

Ideologies are generally counterproductive my friend, except Buddhism, and that only because its first and last instructions are to reject ideologies, including this one.

Go ahead and reject ideologies, then. Now how will you get food? You can't just buy it, after all, without interacting with the local economic system in ways acceptable to that system - and if you do, you're not rejecting its values in any meaningful way.

This is what I meant when I said people aren't really in control of their destiny: believe what you will, but you'll still obey the overlords or die.

What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.

There is, however, an important difference between working to get food and working to get concert tickets. Current economy is ultimately based on coercion: work or die, or at least be extremely miserable. A society where all basic production is automated could guarantee an unconditional middle-class income to its members, so working would be strictly a matter of personal ambition.

Then again, we could already have an unconditional minimum income - and likely end up with a more efficient economy, since it's the coercion-based hierarchy that's the main source of inefficiency in corporations - yet don't do that for ideological reasons. So that suggests we'll see the nightmare scenario of ever-increasing wealth concentration and worsening dystopia instead.

Ayn Rand may have been batshit crazy about some things, but she also was accurate on some of her observations of human nature.

Batshit crazy or just a cynical and calculating con(wo)man. Either would be consistent with flattering the powerful and letting them pretend to be the victims rather than the victimizers...

Wow, quite a distortion you came up with there. Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans? For that matter, why is a "capitalist Republic" allowing it now?

Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.

No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.

Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.

Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.

I once read a story about an alien who didn't have to eat because it was powered by a perpetual motion engine. Does such an alien make a good example of something we might actually encounter? No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.

Just because we are using imaginary examples doesn't mean all such examples are equally credible.

As I said elsewhere, there's no such thing as scalping. Only stupid vendors.

Just like there are no muggers, only unarmed people?

The cops get bolder every year, and people just go along.

All aspects of US keep getting worse. The only thing everyone in the country seem to agree with is that the system itself is their enemy. Add normalization of corruption, the complete dysfunction of the political system, and an economy that's increasingly unable to provide security, comfort or even hope for the better to most citizens, and this starts looking a lot like a collapse in process.

Nations live and die by their perceived legitimacy amongst their citizens, and US is losing its. Just look at the +5 Insightful you got. The story where the representative of national authority is the villain is overcoming the story where they're the hero, despite all the propaganda being pushed out by the Hollywood, tv, etc. The main thing keeping the whole mess still together is the national cult - flag-waving patriotism - but even that's being overcome by tribalism.

Oh well. It'll be "interesting" to see whether China or Russia will assert itself as the new superpower after US is gone.

The panels collect dust, pollen, bird crap, snow, younameit, and either someone has to go there physically and spend time cleaning them up or you have to have some sort of a robotic system for that.

Isn't one of the main problems we're facing right now that we're running out of jobs that are both low-skill yet necessary enough to keep our economy going to be worth paying a decent wage for?

I think it would be wiser to spend the big money on improving solar panel and battery tech.

If you're serious about solar, you don't necessarily need better tech, you just need enough investment money to build massive solar-thermal plants in the desert. These produce energy through heat-driven turbines, thus they don't require solar panels, can be as efficient as material science lets them (the hot end is the surface of the Sun, so theoretical efficiency is a bit over 94%), and can store energy in the form of molten salt (or stone, or steel, if you want to be extreme), allowing them to produce electricity all night long.

It's a weird paradox: renewables suffer from their reputation of being small-scale, down to people installing solar panels in their rooftops, when in reality most of their problems could be easily solved through massive-scale planning (because then you can rely on the law of averages to overcome individual variance). We could cut our economies free from the limits of fossils, we just lack the will.

Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.

Lem's planet and its inhabitant exist in the land of make-believe, and doesn't have any actual history, but actual planets existing in actual spacetime are still subject to be guided by actual archetypes over actual time.

Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.

I presume you mean quantum mechanical gravity, since General Relativity already describes non-Newtonian gravity.

The difference, of course, is that we don't have a century's worth of observational data - or, really, any observational data - on objects that are both very small and very massive, for which it would apply.

Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation. That is a scientific fact.

Assuming the trait is genetically inherited and dependent on genotype in a simple way, possibly. If it's memetic, your attempts to stamp it out could well end up spreading it further by drawing attention to it. But even if it's genetic, evolution has failed to weed out things that will outright kill people, such as Fatal familial insomnia or hemophilia.

This is all ignoring the fact that actual eugenics programs don't typically target specific genes or even traits, but such "traits" as "being poor" or "not staying in kitchen and making sandwiches". They aren't scientific, they're political.

Just because you don't like the political act of mass murder, doesn't make it scientifically invalid.

No, because it was not scientifically valid in the first place. The only reason we're still hearing about eugenics - or ever heard about it in the first place - is that some people get off on cruelty yet don't have the guts to simply admit that, so they make excuses and public policy rather than joining appropriate clubs and dealing with their tastes in the private.

Mind you, the same goes for a lot of stupider policies...