Actually it's suppose to be about not losing knowledge. It's not a reward. It's a social contract. You agree to make your knowledge available for all to use with only limited restrictions and in return we grant you a limited time monopoly. This way knowledge doesn't get locked up behind a guild system. When all this stuff was created guilds were still active and fresh in people's minds...

The drivers are happy because they're healthy. They're making about $12 bucks an hour after the cost of driving is factored in. That's not enough to buy health care but it is enough to disqualify most from the subsidies. At those wages their paycheck to paycheck, and a car wreck with an uninsured driver away from disaster. Speaking of insurance those drivers aren't anywhere near as well insured as a traditional taxicab driver, which is another reason they can out compete taxis.

But there's another nasty side of Uber we haven't seen yet, which is that as work becomes more and more scarce you're going to see more and more people turning to it to pay rent. It's not so much the sharing economy as the desperation economy. That's the rub. Right now there are some drivers doing OK because $12/hour seems like a lot as long as nothing goes wrong, and there's plenty to replace them when it does. But it's a larger part of the race to the bottom that the modern world's caught up in...

The difference here is that Uber has a product. A vile, rent-seeking product built on the corpse of the American Middle Class, but a product nontheless. What companies like Uber and Amazon are doing is bringing the Wal-Mart model to the rest of the workforce. Driving down wages and benefits and skimming off the top of just about every transaction. The money there is huge, especially once you're entrenched. That's why they're valued so high. Real money is in ownership, not petty things like making products and providing services. That stuff's for the plebs.

So, all some poor country has to do is just go ignore IP rights - there' s not a fucking thing the owners can do about it.

Sadly that's not so. Because of TRIPS, the poor country will be excluded from the WTO framework should it fail to honour intellectual "property" laws.

A case in point India. They've been forced to back down on their position on pharmaceutical patents outlined in the (now out of date) article you cite.

could I make a program to generate "The song", e.g. a song that had every possible combination of sheet music, and copyright it? Sure, I'd have to exclude some parts, but I'd still end up owning music for the rest of time.

Food delivery/shops -> with only 25 jobs and thousands of unemployed I can pay those 25 people subsistence wage. They won't be buying food from restaurants. They can barely feed themselves. Same goes for clothing and entertainment. As for cars, hah! They can walk. Meanwhile we're cutting funding to schools. And besides, once they have kids they're dead weight. I'll just fire 'em and hire more young single people from the local tent city.

See, once you start racing to the bottom there's no end in sight. And all the trickle down (voodoo) economics in the world won't save you.

You just discovered Basic Income. Step forward and get your prize.

That said, I love the idea of rebranding it as a "dividend". You might actually sneak it past the 1% that way. Good luck.

that followed the industrial revolution until tech caught up and there was something for people to do again. You're ignoring 2 or 3 lost generations. You're doing this content and safe because you're assuming you'll be dead before the layoffs get to you; and you can't or you're not willing to imagine the same thing happening to your children (or you're a /. meme and you don't have any).

Here's the thing: We CAN imagine it. All of it. You choose not to.

because there isn't enough work to go around, and it's the only way to force hiring and/or better wages. As for France, they didn't really do a 32 hour work week. There were so many exceptions that only a few gov't employees got the benefit. e.g. it didn't work in France because they didn't really try it.

but I know lots and lots of guys who's girlfriend somehow became pregnant while on a pill that's 99.9% effective.

As for fatherhood: 40 years of declining wages have made fatherhood a tough sell. I grew up around and still know a pretty rough crowd. If you don't make much money and probably never will fatherhood doesn't end well. It's why birth rates in Japan keep falling. Nobody's paying us enough to raise a family...

Like, you mean like for war?

What are we gonna do if there are no jobs for the rank & file? We aren't all geniuses ya know? I kept hearing biotech was gonna replace lost manufacturing jobs, but I never once heard anyone say what that meant. It always felt like what you tell the rubes to keep them from getting scared about losing their livelihoods...

that finds it odd that we allow companies to sell a substance who's sole purpose is to be addictive? Anyone ever read the Space Merchants? Popsi ring a bell? I can't say I'm in favor of prohibition, but we can just require them to lower nicotine requirements until it's no longer addictive. People don't smoke for the cool, cool flavor. They smoke because it's highly addictive. Last I heard the Amish were growing nicotine free tobacco...

We don't spend nearly as much on those programs as the right wing would have you believe. Also, any place with socialized medicine is likely to make up the cost of feeding/sheltering those people from the medical expenses. I suppose here in America where we're happy to let most of them die (as long as they're under 65) there's a cost. But in Australia you'll probably blow a few million per person on Chemo before they drop dead.

Will someone explain to me what this troll post means? I can usually figure it out, but it seems like it's just tailor made to piss both sides off at the expense of reason or purpose. Bravo sir! Your post is truly a thing of savage beauty!