And ask him what you can do to improve yourself? Do so in a way that gives him work to do in correcting you. But either way...offer to buy bad code offsets

You can always learn, and the world can always stand to benefit from more people offsetting their Bad Code.

You know what the poor's biggest expense is, then?

Rent.

Do expect automation to produce more than marginal reductions in the cost of real estate?

A jobless person can't buy a cheap iphone at any price. But their relatives, who do have jobs, will buy one for all their unemployed relatives.

Problem solved!

Yeah, because we made a transition to a socialist economy. We called it the New Deal. Also, massive government spending and entitlement programs known as World War II and the GI Bill.

These policies not only forestalled the problem of automation, they lead to the most propsperous generation of in human history. And now that they're being steadily dismantled, goodness - here comes poverty again! It's like 1937 all over again.

The Luddites were right - their livelihoods were devastated, right on schedule, and as predicted.

It's a bit mind-boggling to hear people use the excuse that "it's never happened before", when the reason it's never happened before happens to be the policy positions they oppose.

Business don't chase customers - they chase dollars.

GDP isn't a measure of how many people buy things; it's a measure of how fast dollars are spent. Automation doesn't slow down demand or sales in itself. It jsut shifts the profile of the most lucrative target markest. Businesses will just adapt what they produce to suit the needs of those with the money. If those people are fewer and wealthier, then so be it. Automation itself does not threaten the economy as whole. The GDP can continue to grow while actual people fail to benefit.

So, yes - human beings do indeed get impoverished and put out to pasture.

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Then again, I can't help but notice that wealthy people loan and invest more money than they spend. Wealthier people do spend more, but the ratio of spending (which fuels the GDP) to investments (which don't) decreases with greater wealth. In terms of actually //selling// goods and services to them, they might indeed be a less lucrative market segment in general, especially as the population of that segment shrinks.

That is not how 1 block, 1 vote works.

Way to completely miss his point. Of course you can. It's not about whether an individual is naturally immune to Tuberculosis or not, it's whether the herd is. There is value in a highly educated society that emerges only when you've got enough of them. When your friends and family aren't killing themselves over the latest suicide cult because they have enough education to understand the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, you're better off.

To what 'depth' are you suspecting bitcoin transactions are going, if not one-level deep? While I'll admit that its' in principle possible to have non-final transactions, have you ever actually heard of any?

GDP measures flow. Transaction volume measures flow. Where's the stock?

That's been done, it's not profitable

'Access to the internet' is a bit of a fluid concept. Everyone has access to Iridium internet connections, for the forseable future. Given that a substantial majority of the population of the world own a comptuer (read: cellphone), we're almost there. This isn't 1992 where universal internet access was still a pipe dream -- we're *almost* there. Not quite, but within our lifetime we'll see it. See M-PESA and how the bottom of the pyramid is where this is happening -- access to free banking systems might just be the "killer app" for the remaining parts of humanity without access to them.

Tell that to Wikileaks(1hb5x), who were able to raise 35,000$+ worth of bitcoin when all other methods failed. Admittedly that number could be larger, but the fact that they were able to do that much in and of itself is something.

hit 'submit' instead of 'preview'. doh.

Right now, we've been looking at a consistent 1E6-2E6 BTC worth of transactions a day. That's, at current prices, about 1E7-2E7 USD per day in transactions. 365 days of that, is about 7E9 USD, which is actually more than the economy of Somalia. So what kind of "trouble" are "we" in, anyway?

This will only work if we can cut default fees down from the 0.0005 BTC they are currently at.
Not saying it can't be done, but we're not there yet.
(Disclaimer: I am long bitcoin)