The problem is that with less money floating around in the wild via wages, fewer people have money to spend. The response to that is to lower prices. When two companies producing the same kind of product have reduced their costs, unless they are colluding to keep their prices up, they both lower their prices to make their product more appealing than their competitor's. That's market forces.

Automation will reduce employment. There's no question about that. The remaining jobs will tend to be those that command higher wages, but there will be fewer of them. We're going to have a rough couple of years, but when we come out through the other side, we're in post-scarcity territory.

It's fun to think about whether or not we're a simulation. The idea has a bit of a forbidden fruit kind of appeal to it. If it's true, then everything we thought we knew is wrong, and will have to be re-considered. I've heard the idea about the odds of being in a simulation are astronomically in favor of the simulation, but I'm thinking that there's a load of other factors involved that we're not accounting for. Bostrom touches on difficulty and desire as being potential complications, and that's a good start, but I might point out that if an event necessary to our existence is unlikely to occur, our very existence is evidence enough that the unlikely has occurred.
I've never heard anyone really speculate on the minutia of the simulation's nature though, and I think that we'll get better answers if we can sort out whether or not reality does behave like a simulation. There's quantum weirdness, sure, but while that might be evidence of a simulation that wasn't designed for us to examine things that small, it might also just be evidence that our understanding of it is incorrect.

I don't think I know enough to figure it out that way, but I do know that other people posting things with unique personalities and varied levels of coherence is evidence enough for me that all of this user-generated content isn't created procedurally. All of the characters in a book, no matter how well written, have some common elements to their personalities, as they're limited by the mind of the author. A good author will figure out what makes the character tick and write to that, but the tools he uses to get there are a finger print. I'm used to seeing different perspectives on the same subject from the Left and Right, both of which are internally consistent, and I will still manage to argue about it with either a liberal or a conservative, by coming out of nowhere with a completely different interpretation. It's not random, but the source information does get mangled. I think it's evidence enough that I'm not alone, talking to a bunch of bots. At the very least, we are all bots.

On any platform other than web browsers for PC, the ability to watch or listen to a YouTube video without the YouTube app in the foreground is a feature of Premium. Using the web browser version on the iPhone was a work around to get a Premium feature without paying for it. Whether or not the feature should be Premium or Standard is a whole different matter.

All of these studies where a small portion of a population receives UBI do seem inherently flawed. These people have a little more money in an otherwise normal economy. Their results don't really reveal what's going to happen when UBI is truly universal, because that is absolutely a whole different scenario. I kind of think that UBI doesn't really make a lot of sense until we've automated enough that there really isn't enough work to go around.

I don't think we're ready for a UBI, yet. Automation hasn't caused the cost of living to go down. When food and consumable goods are dirt cheap because they're inexpensive to produce and not enough people are gainfully employed to pay for all of that inexpensive stuff, then we'll be primed for a UBI.

From the summary, it doesn't sound to me, as though he thought he was pushing any boundaries. He was just playing a game, and thought he'd share it on social media. It wasn't a depiction of shooting students or civilians, only literal monsters. This genuinely sounds like an overreaction to me.

The corporations making the profit can be taxed, and the UBI can also be funded by the local natural resources that the corporations are paying for (an interesting case in point is Alaska and its oil). Currently, I don't think either of these offer a sufficient solution, but if we balance things right, the cost of goods goes down, and therefore, so does the cost of living. That might make it a bit easier to fund a UBI. It's going to be a rocky few years in transition, but eventually, the daily needs to be comfortable will be met for free, or nearly free.

This is a post-scarcity economy that we're working toward. At some point, the corporations stop working toward monetary profit, because it no longer makes sense to do so. There's not much profit to make, when no one has any money. Whatever alternative currency or barter system you shift over to, soon becomes a closed and diminishing loop. A large business might be able to remain viable if they're paying out their entire (or near entire) profits, whether through taxes or just paying their employees are higher wage, or even hiring people to do nothing. There are a lot of directions this can go, really, but none of them see businesses continuing to operate the way they currently do. I'm pretty interested to see how it all plays out, myself.

Party loyalty. It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is Donald Trump. It matters that he's a Republican. The political parties in this country really whip their members up into a boiling mess, when the other party has a success, though the Democrats seem to be better at that, than the Republicans. George Bush sends soldiers to the Middle East, he's just trying to extract oil from the area, but a few years later, Barrack Obama sends soldiers to the Middle East, and no one says a damned thing, either because their own party did it first, or because now their party is doing it.

Case in point, you'll find that a lot of people were quite vocal about wanting Bernie Sanders over Hilary during the primaries, to the point of speaking out against Hilary. When the primaries were over, though, and Hilary was chosen as the Democrats' candidate, those same people turned around, and started chanting in favor of Hilary. There are exceptions to this, no doubt, but it's something I saw quite a bit of on Twitter during 2016.

Ultimately, who the candidate is, really isn't so important to people at large, even if they go out of their way to say things for or against that person. Which party they represent, on the other hand, is almost everything.

While possible, it's unlikely, due to the conditions that lend themselves to extreme longevity. People tend to die relatively young in undeveloped cultures, because they lack the medical care that enables long life. It's those developed countries that have the advanced medical care, that also provide public records, which can be used to identify the super-old. The only other possibility, is that there could be a developed country (India or South Korea, perhaps) that didn't have very good public records at the end of the 19th century.

OEM Windows keys won't activate a Retail copy of Windows. It'd actually be a hell of a lot easier for him to just use the manufacturer's installer. The OEM version of Windows has a simplified activation procedure, and the last time I had to do an install using it, I didn't even need to type in the key.

The first thing that you need to understand, is that making a thing illegal doesn't necessarily make it go away. If you want a thing to stop, then the laws you make need to address what causes whatever it is that you don't like. Sometimes, minimizing the extent of a problem starts by legalizing and regulating it. Consider drugs in Portugal, for example. While heroin isn't exactly legal there, it's been decriminalized. Portuguese do not go to prison over heroin, unless they're found with more than a ten day supply. This evidently hasn't meaningfully changed the addiction rate since the policy was introduced in 2001, but the rate of deaths and transmission of HIV among users has been dramatically reduced.

Using prison as an arbitrary deterrent is medieval thinking. In the 21st century, wr should be thinking about how to get the results we want from the legal systems we put in place, rather than relying on the threat of prison, alone.

Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, left the company in 2006, and hasn't been involved at all since 2014. You're blaming him for stuff he's got nothing to do with, and the versions of Windows that did happen under his watch, were quite popular. Except for Windows ME. No one liked Windows ME.

There's also brettanomyces lambicus for Brett beers (and the funk that comes with them), and lactobacillus, used in sour beers. Then there's lots of variety even within a species.

There's a practice of making a culture from whatever you can find in your neighborhood, and that's what a wild beer is about. It's also how brettanomyces lambicus was discovered.

I've generally stopped shopping there, altogether. I have two fundamental complaints. First of all, if I'm paying the premium to get a new copy, I need to receive that game disc in a factory-sealed case. Unless it's a brand new title, it's usually tucked away in that drawer the cashier has behind the counter, which makes it indistinguishable from a used copy; I'm still not convinced that they aren't trying to sell used copies as new. The second thing, is that they are required ridiculously to push their loyalty program. I don't want to subscribe to that magazine, and I'm not keen on buying used games, which makes the membership an entirely useless waste of money, to me. Beyond that, when you decline a loyalty program offer at any other retailer, they drop the subject and just continue with the sale. At GameStop though, declining the offer gets you another ten minutes added to the sale, of the cashier asking you why you don't want it. Should I ever set out to make a purchase there again, should the harassment begin, I'll threaten to cancel my purchase, should the harassment continue.

Would such a new medium of exchange not, in turn, also be money? Sure, it might start out as something practical, like bottle caps or, indeed, precious metals, but once it starts gaining momentum, the same math that applies to the cash dollar, would then apply to your Nuka-Cola lids. Just the same, when that becomes useful for the exchange of goods and services, it's not clear to me that the rich would be hesitant to snatch that up, too. Just the same, the poor folk who acquire sufficient stock piles of these units, would likely be keen to spend them on their own automation products, just to get them up in to Rich-People-Land.

"I'll make my own money, with BLACKJACK and HOOKERS!"