He doesn't necessarily have to take a managerial role, but he does have to understand he will probably reach a relatively low ceiling of pay / responsibilities if he doesn't. One man can only be so valuable with only his own labor. Taking on managerial roles allows skilled people to become a force multiplier, which increases their value.

But if someone is willing to cap out at around $125k (Chicagoland salary) then they can continue being a purely technical resource until retirement if they are really good and keep learning.

Of course toddlers are socialized to desire given things based on sex. It starts within days of birth. Girls are in the pink clothes, boys are in the blue clothes. Girls are more commonly told "you are so pretty" and boys are more commonly told "you are so smart." Girls get a princess castle, boys get a truck. The very fact that Babies R Us even has a boys and girls section for infants and toddlers shows the socialization starts that young.

I'm not saying socialization is the only reason boys and girls are different, but saying toddlers are immune to this socialization is dishonest.

You could still vote for individuals. When they hand out seats to the parties based on proportions, the individuals with the most votes in that party would get the seats.

That is exactly the point the guy was trying to make. They won't do it for minimum wage, which is all they would get because companies are used to having an almost infinite supply of migrant labor. But once pay starts to hit $20-$25 per hour, people would flock to the job. I have a high school friend who works as a garbage man making $70k per year with an amazing pension. He would never do the job for $10/hr, but there was a high enough salary that got him to choose the career.

While that is true for the vast majority of tech workers, for those top 5% of tech workers everyone wants this often isn't the case. The people designing and architecting large enterprise systems or creating new products in start-ups have as much or even more responsibility than their managers. When I am consulting for large corporations any managers under C-level are just window dressing compared to their systems architects. I'm sure those directors make a much larger salary, however.

Acceptable salary ranges and standards of living are very subjective. You could just as easily say that anyone who is making enough money to feed their family shouldn't be dissatisfied when almost a billion people on the planet are starving (including 50 million even in America who are considered food insecure).

The poster you are referring was not only dissatisfied, he also correctly took the steps necessary to correct the problem. So he isn't just some person complaining about his lot in life. Now the only thing he is upset about is that skilled STEM workers have to move to other job roles to make the money he thinks they deserve. I tend to agree with him. As long as you believe his story, it seems even now that he has a $300k salary position he still feels he was as useful in his old role as he is in his new role (or else he shouldn't have been dissatisfied with his old salary).

No one is saying self driven cars are going to be gone immediately after autonomous cars are common. It will take decades before most of them are off the roads. Your old beater probably won't make it another 30 years, and if it does it will be the exception. If the predictions made in the article start coming true, you will start to find it hard to even find a house with a garage. Regulations stopping you from parking a car on the street will become as common as regulations stopping you from stabling your horse on the street. Within 50 years the vast majority of people would simply have no place to keep a car.

That is if renting cars becomes as ubiquitous as the article suggests.

Human drivers will probably exist on the same roads as autonomous cars for many decades, perhaps even forever. Cars started becoming common at about 1900, and by the early 1910s cars outnumbered horse buggies, but horse buggies were still being used in the 1930s. It will likely be the same with autonomous cars. Even after driverless cars are common, it will probably take at least a couple decades for the majority of cars to not require drivers.

I am on the side of people who just enjoy driving. I miss the mustang I gave up when I had children, and I still refuse to own a sedan with under 250 hp because it would be boring. But just how early cars where that much better than horses, autonomous cars will be too practical to not take over.

Once the home renovations start the change will become even more dramatic. There may not be any use for garages even in suburban homes, as a quick text could get you a car within minutes. Garages may become as common as stables within 50 years.

1) It was also the result of the government funding a massive push to educate the workforce in the post-secondary education system. If you look at 1910, which was an era where big business was running things, 2.7% of the population was college educated. By 1990 it was almost double that.

The notion that industrious people created the middle class is laughable. It was clearly a partnership between the public sector which educated the workforce and the private sector that took this new workforce and created a booming economy.

2) You seem to have some belief that the ruling class is different than the industrious people you keep mentioning. Politicians and business owners make up the ruling class.

3) Yes, government regulations clearly have their costs. There is no such thing as a system with no drawbacks. But any system without regulations is going to turn into an oligarchy in short order.

4) No, we trade liberty for comfort all the time, and it is a good thing. Absolute statements are almost always ridiculous. We trade some liberties to create functioning societies because those societies give us more benefits than the few liberties we gave up.

5) If you think work is not a burden you must never have done back breaking labor. Some work is most definitely a burden.

I agree, but the issue is this problem is harder than those that industry leaders are putting billions of dollars of R&D money into. What is $50k really going to accomplish? There are Kaggle competitions that pay out more than that for far more trivial problems (like a marginal increase in CTR prediction).

1) A vibrant middle class is an aberration of history. I don't think we can look to history and find meaningful examples of what exponentially increasing technology will do to our current social structures.

2) Our society determines what basic income is. Just like we determine our laws.

3) Living in a society that respects property rights has its costs. Almost the only difference between the relatively peaceful western world and places like the unrest in the middle east is that the vast majority of our population has a lot of opportunities. You take those away and we will have the same unrest here.

I tend to agree with Thomas Paine, who believed that all citizens have a natural inheritance created by the introduction of the system of landed property. So in return for society recognizing property rights those property holders owe society some of its proceeds. He explicitly stated this should not be considered charity.

4) He never said he thought there would only be positive results. He did say he thinks it would be a good idea, but plenty of good ideas still have consequences. And he was openly asking for other opinions while merely offering his own; there is no need to jump down his throat.

5) No one is saying people would be paid not to work. All people would just be told "you don't have to work to meet your basic needs." Once that burden is removed, people would still be free to work to better their lives further. Very few people would just sit around all day doing nothing, and those that do really would be the ones we want removed from the workforce anyway.

I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.

The trend of the middle class falling into the lower class, and a small minority of the middle class rising into the upper middle class is what automation is creating.

I envision a future (perhaps 20 years out) where there is a huge gap between a servant class and the elite. The elite will still be split between what is now considered the upper middle class and the 1%, but they will all have a much different lifestyle than the servant class. Today's lower class jobs will be replaced with a more personalized service industry, where your average knowledge worker can easily hire a maid for instance. I am barely in the top 5% of household incomes and even I can already have my house cleaned and yard cared for every other week for less than 3% of our monthly net income. In 20 years that will probably turn into paying someone to do my dishes and laundry for me.

A basic income will allow these individuals who cannot command a living wage to still live a good life. I would love for us to move to a system where minimum wage is abolished but everyone receives around $10k per year and all other income is supplementary. Just the reduction in crime alone may even make this less costly to the upper class than paying for our current prison / police infrastructure. And some of the extra taxes you are paying will come back to you in the form of maids who only cost $4/hr.

Even though the government was not a plaintiff or defendant, it is still our laws that are being used to determine if the lawsuit wins. In this particular case it was anti-trust laws which were being examined.

Boys are certainly negatively impacted by macho ideals such as the importance of "being a man." Any claim that girls are negatively affected by big breasted meek women in video games must also concede that boys are negatively affected by buff macho men who can solve all problems by shooting or beating up their opponents. I think both claims are a bit over the top, but making one claim and not the other is quite hypocritical.

I'll help you since your workplace must be blocking Google. From what I was able to briefly find, the meta-analysis of current research shows three things:

1) Blended use of technology and traditional learning probably produces the best results.
2) We are still figuring out how to best use technology in the classroom, but we are improving.
3) There has not been nearly enough large scale research to "prove" any assertions about the effectiveness of individual techniques in bringing technology to the classroom.

Does the Use of Technology Improve Learning?
The Answer Lies in Design
Effective Use of Technology as a Learning Tool
Learning with Technology. Evidence that technology can, and does, support learning.
Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning. A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies
Using Technology in Education: Does It Improve Anything?

And depending on your definition of "sponsored by someone trying to sell stuff", you are probably unlikely to find many studies at all like that (a fact brought up by a couple of the above studies). Since most school districts cannot afford to spend money on unproven technologies, a large percentage of these studies have their devices donated or heavily subsidized by the device manufacturer. Here are some iPad specific ones, but even though some of them may have had iPads donated they still back up their research with actual test scores.

Five Studies to Prove the iPad’s Educational Worth
iPad improves Kindergartners literacy scores
Study Finds Benefits in Use of iPad as an Educational Tool
iPads Improve Classroom Learning, Study Finds
iPad a Solid Education Tool, Study Reports