Build on a flood plain, make millions of dollars today, and let the tax payers pick up the bill after a catastrophic 100-year flood years later. Rinse, rebuild and repeat.

Seeing how those tax payers have spent 100 years eating cheap food from that fertile flood plain, and the bill only amounts to a tiny fraction of their direct savings - much less the increased economic opportunities inherent in a more populous nation - it works out quite nicely to everyone. Until, that is, someone starts making noices about taxes being stealing, the city remains a ruin, and everyone starves.

Other than the "ownership" hyperbole, you're right, regardless of the posterior plumbing of the douchebag.

The whole point of slapping - or other low-intensity violence - is to show the victim's very body is perpetrator's possession, to do with as they please. Please explain how describing this as ownership is hyperbolical?

Except the numbers show that, obviously, people do just that. And when a stronger target DOES hit back, the attacker takes more hurt than gives.

Half of population are below median intelligence. Bullies are no exception.

I used to agree with this just as vehemently as you seem to. When the bullies started coming up without a Y-chromosome, though, I'm sexist enough to content myself with discrediting them.

I'm sorry to hear that. Let's hope you get better soon.

A man who slaps around a woman is statistically much more likely to be punished in court, pilloried by the media, and basically served up to the metaphorical stake. A woman who permanently disfigures a man is fodder for a bunch of washed up old women on a TV talk show.

Just out of curiosity, what talk shows have so many women who disfigured a man and got away with it that you can make meaningful statistics about such appearances?

Also, while "slapping someone around" is not as serious as a fisthfight as far as medical consequences go, the implications are actually far nastier. It's not a fight between equals, it's some douchebag asserting their power - their ownership - over someone else. Because you don't slap someone who might punch back, precisely because it does nothing but anger the target, but only someone who you think is incapable of fighting back either physically or even legally. People engaging in such bullying absolutely should be made examples of, and deserve no one's sympathy when they are. Goddamn overgrown schoolyard bullies.

The problem is that there aren't any truly capitalist states, nor has one ever existed.

Then how do you know that

A truly capitalist state would be vastly more harmonious and progressive than most any other kind of state, the misery and repression begin when capitalism begins to slip into fascist corporatism.

?

If 20th century taught us anything, it's that ideologies that promise Earthly paradise in return for absolute obedience are extremely suspect.

There's one problem it won't fix: the Greek debts to EU are not going to shift to the a currency just because Greece does. The debts to the rest of the EU will remain in Euros, and if the Greek "new Drachma" devalues massively compared to the Euro, the relative loan repayments in new Drachma will go up correspondingly.

And the reason a financially independent Greece would keep paying Euro loans is...?

Frankly, Euro was doomed from the beginning. As long as national currencies could float relative to each other deficits and surpluses balanced automatically through such adjustment. Euro scrapped this mechanism with replacing it with another, so now weakest EU nation goes bankrupt, then the next weakest, then the next, etc. Ultimately, they all serve as permanently indentured servants to the final victor (almost certainly Germany). Except of course they'll simply break away, returning their national currencies and declaring their Euro debt null and void.

So what happens when we design an economy that doesn't need money?

Who's we? People with money aren't going to give up their power over other people. And those other people aren't going to give up their chance to become the oppressors themselves, even if the chance is purely hypothetical; American elections are proof enough of that.

Human evil is one problem technology can't overcome.

The part being copied would have to be something that is unavailable otherwise and/or very costly to be worth the time/effort to counterfeit it with a 3D printer.

Spare parts and specialty tools. I constantly find myself needing some weirdly shaped piece of plastic that's impossible to find anywhere.

Jewelry? Too much scrutiny applied there, too.

You do realize some people wear jewelry as ornamentation, and thus don't care if it has the right density of defects visible only when viewed with an electron microscope?

If you are truly so ignorant to believe that the US moon landing is fake explain why we have been able to bounce lasers off specific spots on the moon since the late 60s.

Because Moon is a giant disco ball covered in space dust. The mirrored surface shines through in some places.

You are trying to replace humans, not Vulcans. Kirk ran the missions better than Spock because he could identify better with illogical and petty aliens.

Kirk ran the missions better because the writers were flattering the audience. In reality a rational machine will simply learn how humans actually react, not how they should react according to logic/economics/whatever.

Economics isn't pseudoscience.

Most of the time, economics is simply various economists or think tanks pushing policies advantageous to their patron's ideological or financial goals. So it's not even pseudoscience, but flat-out astrology.

Before the programmer who is automating job X is laid off, the person currently performing job X will be laid off due to the new program. Programmers will outlast the positions they are automating.

A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?

If I were the author, I'd worry less about the programmer and more about how this world will handle the potential mass unemployment situation.

It has run up huge debts in a desperate attempt to keep demand up, and is now collapsing under them. It's not a "potential situation", we've had unemployment and underpaid workers for decades and now the bill is in the mail.

A better question is what'll replace it: will general desperation allow communism to rise up again for round two, or will someone come up with something new?

The possibility that intelligent aliens who are pacifistic cannot be ruled out.

Then they won't last long after meeting up with us.

Because a peaceful species would be jealous about our chance to die in a ditch or nuclear fireball, and seek to imitate us?

If anything, we'd be used as a cautionary example of playing with powers we can't control.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Problem is, the bad guy gets at least a few shots by surprise, and then there's the next incident, and the next, and... Bad Guy With Gun is an enemy you can never beat by shooting.

Aggression is ultimately what gets people out of bed in the morning instead of just remaining immobile and dying of thirst.

No, it's the thirst. What do you think people are - Sith Lords?

"Use your aggressive feelings. Let the * flow through your * !"

If something isn't aggressive it isn't alive or soon wont be.

That depends on just what is meant by aggression. Mr. Hawking is talking about nuclear war, so he likely referred to the popular meaning which implies force or at least hostility. And you seem to be equating any and all "energy" with it.