The simplest explanation of why it's wrong is that it's Deterministic. i.e. it's part of the "Clockwork universe" and if that's true, then you do not have free will and we should all just throw in the towel now...

While we're at it, the Second Law of Thermodynamics must be wrong because I'd like a perpetual motion machine and conservation of momentum must get temporarily suspended when someone's about to be run over by a truck.

Also, determinism doesn't conflict with free will. Determinism is a concept in physics and free will is a concept in law and philosophy. If you try to contrast them, you'll end up equating free will with randomness: you didn't write your message based on your beliefs which you've formed based on your character and experience (since that would be deterministic), but rather it's the equivalent of "cat /dev/random | strings".

Determinism = fail

No, but even if it was, it in no way would disprove it.

There is one HUGE difference between these factories and a labor camp: In a labor camp, you can't say "I quit" and walk out.

Sure you can. You'll be shot if you do, but that doesn't make you any deader than starving to death after walking out of these factories would.

Rule people through direct violence, and you'll look like a villain. Rule people through only letting them eat if they do what you want, and you'll look like a good capitalist.

Cause the terrorists have won.

We thought their game was through, but they knew the Konami Code.

The constitution exists to limit the government's power to interfere with your liberty.

Specifically, it can only do so if it thinks it's for the best ("general welfare") or might have any effect whatsoever ("interstate trade").

Only leftist idiots think that it's the government that grants you your rights.

The government doesn't grant people rights, but it oversees and manages the web of institutions which enforce them. The property rights right wing so adores don't mean a thing in a jungle.

That's 100% Nanny State backwards.

"Nanny State" exists because of Gilded Age. Every time economic controls are loosened, it leads to wealth concentration and eventual collapse. It's what's happening right now, and will only end with re-instatement of a Nanny State strong enough to enforce sufficient redistribution of income.

The competition among virtual currencies and their continuing evolution demonstrate their uselessness as stores of value.

Economic value is like potential energy: it only makes sense in the context of some system. A dollar, a bar of gold or unspent transactions in the Bitcoin ledger have no inherent value, but someone might accept any or all of them in exchange for something else. But economy is ever-evolving, and in fact currently going through a major crisis, so economic value cannot be reliably stored for any length of time. The best you can do is watch which way the changes are going and transferring value away from failing forms.

As long as there are cowards, there will be people selling insurance.

As long as some entities have a higher capacity to absorb temporary setbacks than others, they can trade on this ability like any other good. But I suppose that doesn't make as good a soundbite.

The only "accidental" discovery in science is the discovery one could have stretched out over a great many more research grants if one had better anticipated the scientific windfall.

Of course, we do tend to refer to the outcome of bad planning as "an accident" concerning our hominid prime directive, so perhaps there's no help for language after all.

You do realize that a narrative of this type can be fashioned around the prevailing conditions of all human societies at all points in human history?

America is an especially big and complex society, so one needs a correspondingly large and complex boogie man (though nevertheless, reductive to the core).

In the gospel of the one true fracture, defining yourself as against something only serves to throw more fuel on the fire. In reality, complex systems have hundreds or thousands of fault lines, and it's not always the case that the largest fault line is hovering around the supercritical state. Unless we all agree to obsess about it. Then the story self propels.

The slow march of AI is going to spin our a thousand fault lines. Get yours today!

Unless they get employed doing something else.

Suppose you have 10 people and 10 jobs. One job is eliminated by technology. Now you have 10 people and 9 jobs. That 1 newly unemployed dude tries to get another job, but to do so he'll have to oucompete 1 of the remaining 9 employed people out of their job. So how will he compete? Why, he'll do the job for less money. So now we have 9 people with lower average wage, and 1 unemployed dude. This merry-go-round will then continue. Also, as wages fall so will the total buying power of the workforce, which creates further downward pressure.

Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production. It predates Industrial Revolution, almost collapsed as a result of it, and is heading back towards the cliffs now that true believers have managed to convince themselves that the fall of Soviet Russia means revolution is no longer possible and dismantled the compensating systems.

The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.

"Remaining jobs" need not decline and it's worth noting that they actually aren't declining at present.

According to the article they do. Also, when was the last time job market was good for the employees?

Second thing, most examples given are low wages jobs, then the argument does not hold water if you pretend it is responsible for stagnation of the average wages, the average wages should go up if there is less people with minimum wages.

If you destroy a low-wage job, the workers who previously did it become unemployed, and their wage goes to zero. Also, there's more competition for the remaining jobs, thus even non-zero wages tend to fall.

Next it's not that hard to develop mathematical techniques to analyze text and language in posts ...

Budget projects much? "Doable" and "easy" are not the same words. I'm guessing one person out of a hundred in the general population could take a reasonable stab at developing such an algorithm, and only one person out of a thousand could be considered a natural talent.

The first 20% of the work gets you to sqrt(sqrt(7e9)) as your mean perplexity, which is simultaneously impressive and yet not terribly actionable. And then the difficulty curve shoots off into the exponential regime.

They wear glasses without any lenses, for crying out loud. No sane person would do something that fucking dumb.

No sane person would care if someone did.

I'm trying to think of a better word than "hypocrisy.

"Psychosis". That seems to be pretty much perfect description for condemning someone based on actions you imagined them taking.

Airbus, not the most efficient of global corporations, can remain a profitable concern only by making rational commercial decisions. If that means negotiating with a non-European supplier then the good French senator Alain Gournac ought to find out why Ariane 5 (or 6) were deficient and figure out how to make them competitive.

Airbus, a corporation, can only remain profitable by making rational commercial decisions. And France, a nation, can only remain prosperous by making rational political decisions. And since Airbus and France are not the same entity, their interests can and in this case do conflict. In this situation, the good French senator Alain Gournac is doing exactly what he ought: using the resources at his disposal to affect the outcome so it becomes more favorable to his nation. Whether the methods are ethical can be debated, as well as what, exactly speaking, constitutes the short, medium and long-term interests of France. However, simply asserting that Airbus's profitability should be an important concern for either Mr. Gournac, us, or anyone but Airbus stakeholders rises the question:

Why in blazes should a French senator put the interests of Airbus over France?

But that would require the Monsieur Gournac to pull his thumb outta his ass and do some real work.

He did. The very title says he "attacked" Airbus. That you don't agree about his methods doesn't mean they're not "real" work.