I think we need to start convincing people that "the future is now" and that we are going to begin to be able to start showing some fruits from all this technology in the form of some sort of income people rely on. I am, at least in theory, in favor of some means of a basic income.

The problem is, I have no idea who can create that program and then manage it safely. Just the thought of the government handing *everyone* a check in lieu of a job gives me the willies. Or rather, the potential of vast corruption involved in being personally responsible for everyone's actual livelihood.

Independence, even if it is only nominal, does mean something. We need to figure out how to make progress without the corruption, abuse, and loss of independence it could engender.

This is the equivalent to the periodic scenario where HR accidentally emails the spreadsheet with everyone's salary numbers to the Everyone list.

And yes, back in the days I was an email administrator, I had to try and do damage control on someone who had actually done that. Twice. Others probably have similar stories.

Actually, it's gotten better now, ironically, now that all that stuff is stored in some cloud app. Now the people just have accounts that they can run their own reports from. Of course, in smaller, or less tech savvy businesses, people are probably still passing those sorts of spreadsheets via email even today.

Well, theoretically, you wouldn't give a raise of 10 million to the executives for a savings of $10 million on automation. You're forgetting the shareholders. The board isn't approving increases to your compensation without you showing how you brought them more money.

It may well be that the way to ensure that normal people don't get knocked out of the loop is that they get to become shareholders and manage an income based on that. Then it doesn't really matter if the execs get a bonus for automating, because they're not really hurting anyone that way.

The problem we have in our current scenario, is that automation doesn't help anyone if you render your customers unable to pay for your product.

The reality is that the automation driving people out of jobs will eventually equalize somewhere. The problem is that the equalization may be in the form of bloody revolution. We need to think of something to forestall that situation.

Realistically, a revolution could manifest as a Luddite reaction which puts more people back to work, but at the expense of automation. We need to avoid that future, because it isn't progress. Progress is automation providing for us, while we do more interesting things.

Yes, but it also implies that someone has a goal in mind by framing China. Either to hide their own activities or to make China look bad.

Who else has the motive to take down GitHub? Organized crime could, but what do they get out of it? The US Government could, but what would the goal be?

Unless someone provides motives for other players at that level to make that attack, it's probably China. Simple internet trolls might know how to operate such an attack but probably not the capacity to perform it.

The problem with robots is that they are replacing humans in a world where humans often define their own value by the things that they do. Once they are no longer seen as tools, but instead as creators or self actuated, they become competition for the things that make life worth living for some.

That's not an easy problem to fix, even if your AI's don't go mad and kill us all (purposefully or accidentally), they could cause a descent into unrest or ennui.

What I don't believe is that AIs will be somehow alien to humans, as they'd be created with the only template for intelligence that we have: our own.

Granted, the idea of providing immense capabilities to an AI is scary, but probably no more scary than providing immense capabilities to stock humans.

Honestly? Jesus would probably ignore this law, and simply expect people to do unto others.... Effectively attempting to get Jesus to talk about politics is what the Pharisees tried to get him to do, and he wasn't having it.

Which is to say, he'd expect the people who had the right to treat other people poorly to not use their legal right. You can cast stones, which is your right under the law, but you know why you shouldn't. You can close your doors to people you consider sinners, but you know why you should not.

Still, if he really did believe that homosexuality was a sin, he would not have minced words about it. There are no direct quotes on that, so we don't know his actual opinion. It may have differed, or it may have been the same as conventional views of that time.

Its like done and "done done". We may want to adjust our definition of "done" and "dead" in our next retrospective.

While it is nice to believe that they care about our privacy, the reality is that spooks only care about their budgets and information. Their focus on what they do, day to day, is about the same in just about any field. The talk about rights and The American People, comes from the political hacks running the agencies and Congress.

Sometimes, I am sure, someone speaks up about this or that privacy issue, sort of like someone always has to point out that "this is waterfall, not Agile", and the rest of them roll their eyes and tell that guy to get back to work because they need to get the project done sometime this century.

Don't believe it. They just want to distract your attention from Telegraphgate.

I don't think people who thought this before Snowden were considered crazy. Everyone knew about signals intelligence or suspected it to some degree.

What makes a tin-foil hatter is not necessarily their insight into what is happening, but what that *means*. This was supposed to be some sort of New World Order/Illuminati plot to rule the world and control our precious bodily fluids. Which isn't exactly what we got.

The NSA is expected to monitor communications. It is a signals intelligence agency. Anyone who knew what the NSA does knows that it monitors that stuff.

I also don't think anyone who knew what the NSA did truly believed that the NSA didn't monitor data internal to the US in doing their duties. While technically illegal, I don't know that anyone really cares as long as this information isn't used against normal citizens who aren't terrorists. That's a pretty shitty thing for an idealist to swallow, but business as usual for anyone who is the least bit pragmatic about it.

The fact is, no one cares now because while Snowden did a good job of embarrassing the US government, he didn't actually expose a program to keep neat records on individuals which was used, J. Edgar Hoover-style, to get their way to create a reign of terror and a new state panopticon. It was like lifting up a rock and seeing the bugs scurrying around under it. It's not pleasant to look at, but at the same time, it was exactly what everyone expected already.

You know what the biggest threat to the US is today? The US Government, but not one piece of the US Government, the whole thing. Not because it is an Orwellian nightmare, but because it is a bureaucratic nightmare that is decoupling from the control of the public by clever manipulation of hot button issues and gerrymandering. The NSA does things for the same reason the VA executives covered things up: they are only looking out for their own territories and trying to save face. They only care about Congress, and Congress has a 12% rating and still gets re-elected. So what does that say about who the government really works for?

Which French Revolution?

The one that started in 1789 resulted in a Reign of Terror followed by a reactionary Junta-like Directory, followed by the Emperor of the French, Napoleon I?

I think the French probably would have been better off without the Revolution, although it did eventually work out for them in the end. Four Republics and four monarchies later.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks of the French Revolution as a success. All of the progress came from them getting tired of killing each other and everyone else.

It's not just State, CIA, NSA, FBI, Secret Service. VA hospital execs lying. IRS auditors auditing.

The problem is truly that the US Government operates as a corporation which is beholden to its shareholders (who are not the voters, of course) and employees. It is going to do this because gerrymandering and its sheer size make it unaccountable to the public.

Yes, you don't have to completely eat up the revenues of the whole company to make them reconsider. If enough is removed to make Bezos drop a pet project, or to make the board unhappy about the possibility of making a profit, it will cause a hit.

Still, it is scattershot. They might instead decide to lay off a bunch of people to recoup the cash and simply change locations or something.

It can be surprisingly easy to find out where someone has gone, actually, unless they talk to almost no one about it. In IT anyway.

I'd imagine that you might be able to get lost more easily if you were a warehouse worker.

I agree that this non-compete is a dead letter for someone like a warehouse worker. I just hope the scare tactic doesn't work on them.

Fair enough, but a warehouse worker isn't going to easily find a job in a place where they store something that Amazon doesn't sell. They aren't going to have a lot of choice but to ignore the non-compete or go on welfare or something.

I don't see why you would put a non-compete on a warehouse worker and expect to justify that as protecting your trade secrets.