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.

It sounds more like a personal computer to me. The miniaturization, mobility and computational power aspect is missing. There the progress went much faster than anything anybody in the 60's anticipated.

Of course it does make a difference. 50 years ago, nobody thought we could produce enough food for double the world population without causing an ecological catastrophe like chopping down all the forests. Don't try to pretend that this 'technical' aspect is something you can just wave off as insignificant.

Buggy whip manufactury closed I would tell the workers - go work for Ford or GE or whoever, Underwood workers could go work for Olivetti, or in retail

Where are the current low skilled workers supposed to go? The time is coming where any job that does not need empathy or creativity can be done by a machine.

Now nobody here or in TFA is 'holding back progress' - so your pleading to stop doing it is going to fall on deaf ears.

But should we pretend there is no problem at all?

Ten years is hardly 'gradual' if we're talking about generations. If it really happens within the next 10 years, then it's going to affect 90% of the current professional drivers.

Then there's a list of big things that he did not see coming at all:

- the internet!
- computers thousand times stronger than anything in 1964 - the size of your palm - in everybody's pocket
- advances in medical science - stem cells, 3d printing of tissue etc. and in medical technology - scanners creating a 3d model of your body (including the inside)
- detection and photography of extrasolar planets
- a man made probe exiting the solar system
- despite the overpopulation, abundance of food for everybody
etc.

But they all are in fact getting less exercise then their wild counterparts. Plus a lot of them are bred to reinforce some specific traits like calmness. The more calm an animal, the less calories it burns (no running around, fidgeting etc.).

Somehow the author of TFA forgot about that