pre-history of the Great Labor Crash

Is there a reason your father MUST be on Windows? Is he primarily browsing and using office productivity applications? If he does not have specific requirements (such as gaming, high end graphics/video production, ect) then he should not be running Windows to begin with.

Get thee to Linux Mint, good sir, and do have that son to father talk regardless. Giving out personal info to strangers is insane.

Don't we have a sustained unemployment problem nationwide? ...check!
Wouldn't it be a burden on taxpayers to have to provide supportive care to people who are just making the unemployment figures high? ...check!

Is there a way we can make this West Nile Virus a national epidemic, and maybe increase it's potency? (I kid, I kid!)

being ground up for food and packaged by Soylent Corporation.

"Field of Corpses" sounds more like a deathrock or gothic rock band.

After back surgery years ago I cannot stand for long periods at a time, even when I'm relatively fit. I do make attempts to get up regularly and go for short walks. Having a cup of water on my desk (not an entire jug) keeps me up every hour or so - a trip down one hall for relief, then a trip down another hall for fresh H20.

I position my desk so that my entire forearm can rest comfortably on the desk surface with upper arms in a mostly downward position. I type with at least one forearm mostly on the table (and use a standard querty keyboard). My monitor sits about even with my eyes.

I also make a point to drink a LOT of fluids so that I am forced to get up at regular intervals. Humans were not designed to remain in a seated posiiton for long periods at a time.

Also, no overhead florescents for me - those are off. I have a single table lamp (from home) on a desk nearby, which provides enough lumination for the entire office. I only turn on the overhead cubicle lamp if I am going to spend extended time reading or writing on paper. Otherwise the glare is a huge annoyance.

Some of the later Berserker books were pretty dark and hopeless. I maintain that Star Trek came up with the idea for Borg from Saberhagen's Berserkers.

The Robots *make* you soylent green.

Not necessarily. If people make a conscious choice to support regionally local companies that produce things in a way that provides decent employment without automation via robotics, the companies that automate and/or offshore will lose business.

Be prepared to pay a little more, but right now - today - is the time to act. Not a few years from now. Hell the time to act was 30-40 years ago, this shit could have been nipped in the bud.

Bingo. When I read the headline I did not jump to conclusions that this would end up creating more work for domestic IT pros. My first and gut reaction is exactly what you predict. This is no way means that GM is not going to continue using cheaper overseas labor. It just means that they are going to have a more direct role in things.. cut out the middle management so to speak.

You LIE!

It's perfectly OK to be disrespectful to a sitting Democratic president, but god save your soul if you dare to suggest anything negative about a past Republican president.

Libertarian fairy dust. Everything is always so easy to fix, and always involves somehow redesign the fabric of society so that mysteriously, we'll end up with an even greater disparity between wealthy and poor.

I am done with Republicans and Democrats. But it's the canned Libertarian answers to every problem (always deregulation or eliminating government from our lives, yawn) that prevent me from taking that party seriously either. Virtually no real thought placed into the likely outcomes - just the stuff of fantasyland.

"We'll need people to watch over the machines, build the machines, care for the machines, and install the machines."

Same thing the auto workers were told as the factories began replacing workers with robots. You'll be needed to *fix* the robots. True, but only half true. The falsehood is the assumption made that the majority of workers will transition into robot-fixing careers. The fact is that automation made a large number of those jobs obsolete.

If you're managing factories, you are going to look at this aspect of capitalism with rose colored glasses.

And what pray tell do you suggest the billions of workers of the world do once we reach the end point of automation technology - rendering the bulk of today's jobs obsolete?

There is no way we can continue supporting billions of people on this planet with increasing and sustained levels of unemployment, starvation and homelessness. Who's putting their hand up first for elective self-elimination? Or do we wait and let "nature" take its course with a pandemic?