He meant starting at 1500, not 1900. There are people who believe that the past 200 years have been an aberration caused by free energy, and that when it ends the world will return to when growth was closer to 2% per year.

The biggest problem as I see it is that so many people think it's the government's job now. After all, we pay a lot of taxes and the government has a lot of social programs. Why do more? I used to think that way myself.

But these days, I just accept my taxes as a total loss, and only count as charity what I give to good charities that I trust. I also prefer charities focused on fixing the underlying issues, over the merely palliative.

With a 10% annual growth, you hit a million in 20 years. That grows to $5 million in about 35 years. That becomes $2.5 million after 35 years when you count inflation, but that still shows it is pretty easy to hit a million in any professional level job.

And so a common solution at the time was to occasionally have the cops beat all the beggars out of town with cudgels. No more problem with seeing the homeless.

The issue isn't seeing, the issue is caring. (And personally, my charity goes to people around the world with much worse problems than America's "poor", people whom I will never see, but that's just me.)

People sent texts from protest marches in Iran and some of the Arab spring stuff, and the governments weren't successful in stopping that. Also, you need a bigger hammer to keep people from using their phones to record police shooting at the crowd or other abuses. Remotely wiping the phones is a great win for dictators everywhere.

Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.

I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming, and it's been gradually downhill ever since as focus shifted to multiplayer, or incorporated RPG elements. (Quake 4 was also pretty good, but it was a deliberate throwback to those days).

Not that I hate FPS RPGs, but it's a different genre.

Just watch for the first riot in 2016 under some authoritarian government. They'll "kill" all the cellphones of all the rioters to prevent organization and photography of police, not even a question about it.

Most employers match that at least a little. Long term tax-free growth of "double every 10 years" is reasonable to expect from stocks. After 30 years, having 70 years of savings is a reasonable goal. Of course, your pay's going up and inflation is too and so on, but still, becoming a millionaire from 30 years of 401K savings is quite practical. Doing the same for "millionaire in today's dollars", a far more interesting goal, is quite practical given 40 years of 401K savings.

Of course, best to save more elsewhere, and try to retire earlier than 40 years.

Gold is a good measure of inflation if you take the 10-year-average, or maybe the 20-year, of gold prices. While gold is hopelessly volatile in the short term, it seems to keep reasonably equivalent purchasing power century-by-century.

Home prices work out about the same, BTW. While real estate markets can be just as volatile, long term house prices are flat with inflation, which makes a lot of sense (the % of income people are willing/able to spend on housing won't change unless human nature changes, so you expect the average house to represent a given amount of purchasing power).

Unless the meaning of millionaire is changing to mean "a seven figure income", then why would anyone with a six figure income not expect to become a millionaire? Are people just really bad at saving? That's too low to even be a good retirement goal, unless you're sure of Social Security to compliment it (in which case it's about right - but who doesn't expect SS to be "means tested" and taken away from those who save?)

Removing the convenience of corporations (limited liability, other laws) may or may not affect their size. It won't affect their speech, which would continue. People using the money of businesses they own to affect laws which affect them.

That's just one of many angles. The biggest may be early access to games for reviewers. A game review is of course more valuable if it's out before the game is, but that requires playing nice with the publishers.

You've never worked for a start up? It's all about the IPO. Technological advancement for the past 15 years or so anyway has been driven by the hopes of IPO, or as "plan B", acquisition by a big company at a price established by what an IPO might bring.

The secondary market sets the benchmark for what a successful small company is worth, which in turn drives the availability of investment in start-ups and other small businesses.

And that's a terrible, terrible thing. We should stop doing that.