I get a strong sense of the bovine fecal matter just from reading the texts on the packaging. That stuff is quite potent!

Well written. I'd say that any job that does not require creativity or empathy is on the line. There are a couple of jobs that don't require much skills that will stay, like waiters, babysitters and receptionists - everything where the very fact that the customer is interacting with a human being is valuable. But there are nearly not enough of jobs like that and too many people who can't even do those. I doubt that anybody will entrust their toddler to Swen, the oil rig worker.

This is not a story about bank bailouts but about job automation.

You vastly underestimate the need for demand. If all people in the US decided to cut their expenses in half and stuff their money into their mattresses today and do so for the next 5 years, the economy would shrink and a lot of people would lose their jobs. There wouldn't be enough money circulating in the economy to support all the jobs. Not bullshit artificial jobs created just so people would have something to do, but real ones. The economy would have the *potential* to do much more, but wouldn't because of the missing demand.

Automation of all low skill jobs has the potential to create a situation like described above - if a large percentage of population is replaced by automation, there will not be enough demand for the goods and services - even though the economy would have enough capacity to build and provide all the stuff (through automation), it could not sell all of it.

Sooner or later the helicopter drops will have to come.

You mean to the one where the US sent in troops without any insignia with the goal of annexing Iraq as the 51st state?

All of these comparisons are ridiculous.

There were 80 - 100 protesters and you want to compare that to Kristallnacht and the French Revolution?

The closest that you could compare them to is Westboro Baptist Church - a small number of people that make the news because their cause is weird and while on one hand you understand where they're coming from, they are also spectacularly wrong.

That means you have double the workforce competing for the same jobs. Except even that's not accurate enough. There's 50% more population, so even more than double the work force and low skill jobs are disappearing due to technological advances and outsourcing.

If you suddenly dumped 100 million people into the workforce in 1975, the society would collapse. So the fact that the economy in 2014 can support such numbers means we are better off than in 1975

Very little, maybe none. The stock was not bought from the shareholders. The company had to emit new stock, meaning the value of the existing stock went down. Pretty drastically. So the owners of GM were hurt by the "bailout".

That might sound like a great way to punish the people who own the company who messed up - until you look at who the people are. In 2008 the greatest shareholders were the US and Canadian governments. The second greatest were the GM employees. The rich people are not stupid, they got rid of the stock before everything went down the drain.

If the company's liquidated assets total to less then it's outstanding debt, then yes, even the top preferred shareholders get zero money back. Back in 2008 when GM was bailed out the asset to debt ratio was about 1/2...

You are wrong.

a) As a "bailout", the fed took ownership of the company through stock. How shall GM pay their owners? From what? Shall they take a loan to pay them? From whom? Should they only pay the fed or the other owners as well?

b) If the company had tanked, its assets would be liquidated and payed out to the creditors. Not the owners, you see, because they are the ones who failed. They are left with nothing when the company fails

I don't think the One Click patent is the problem here. That one is at least clearly written and actually used by the company. It's the intentionally obfuscated and overly general patents that serve no practical purpose to the holder that bog the economy down.

We had the technology to detect planets for at least 80 years yet the first efforts started just 30 years ago. You know why? Because our star system model predicted that there are no planets that meet the condition to be detected by us (big, close to the star).

A model based on a sample of one system.

After people discovered a whole bunch of such planets, I thought that people would realize that they should not judge the universe based on just our solar system, but here it is all over again.

That's exactly my point. The poster I was responding to was portraying the sharing business as something new, something extraordinary that will ruin the world economy forever.

So according to your little theory, we should be having lower living standards than we had in the year 1950. Somehow you'd be hard-pressed to find an indicator that would support that claim. Real income, life expectancy, literacy, access to sewage and electricity, child mortality, number of cars per capita, % of people above poverty line etc. All are higher now than in 1950 . Unemployment is probably the only indicator you could point to (7,6% as opposed to 5.3%) but general well-being - not by a mile!

But something is being used up. My car will break after 150 000 miles. If I ride it alone, it will take 10 years. If I share it/rent it out, it will happen in 4 years and I will have to get a new one sooner. Same goes for the furnishings and the paint in the room I share, the lawnmower, the sander and everything else that's being shared through these services.

Something requiring empathy and/or creativity. If there's somebody neither creative nor emphatic, he should be on a disability. Because there is not going to be any work not requiring these things left for people in the near future.