Whilst the proliferation of easy credit shoulders a lot of the blame, a significant amount still falls onto the shoulders of the credit addled. They could say "no" when the bank offers them an easy loan. They could say "no" I dont need an expensive car. They could say "no" to credit and pay cash/debit at the store.

They could say "no" to credit, live miserly, and then get in debt anyway due to, say, medical bills. Or they could use credit and at least have good memories on their deathbed.

Can an average person afford to buy a car?

No, but he has to anyway, since the car manufacturers bought up and destroyed public transport and city planners make sure it's almost impossible to live near work and services.

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

The fact they aren't working there anymore suggest they weren't.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.

So the employees rather than shareholders, managers or the CEO got a fat paycheck for being good at their jobs. That's communism!

Who is the one coming out asking the Congress to extend the Patriot Act?

Dictators don't ask.

This is evil incarnate.

So... Hitler was reborn as Slashdot? That explains why this place is so obsessed with karma.

If we could thrawl space for dissipated matter and energy and thus create new stars, wouldn't the stop the heat death?

That particular method won't work, since stars "burn" fuel and eventually all will be gone. However, combining general relativity with quantum physics might allow us to control the shape of spacetime in a way that basically amounts to creating new "baby" universes.

Alternatively, an expanding universe can not actually experience heat death, since the expansion itself causes the ambient temperature to fall. However, taking advantage of this fact would require giving up anything resembling our current fleshy forms. Of course, we'll probably end up doing that anyway, since mind uploading has obvious advantages once we leave the only known environment - Earth - where our bodies are actually convenient. And of course, it might turn out mind uploading is actually impossible, in which case we have problems.

And of course, it's always possible that the Laws of Thermodynamics are not, in fact, absolute, or more likely, don't mean what we think they mean. It wouldn't be the first time people jumped to conclusions without thinking of all the implications.

There are times i wonder if WW2 was facists vs facists about who was to run the circus.

Fighting fascists on their own terms will, of course, make you more like them. Just like the Cold War led to the committee of counter-revolutionary - excuse me, anti-American - activities, War on Drugs led to police behaving like a criminal cartel, War on Terror in practice means assassinations and bombings, and so forth. You cannot wield power without yielding to it; you can sit on a throne but it'll be the logic of the throne which dictates your actions, not the other way around.

"Even if we lose this war, we still win, for our spirit will have penetrated our enemies' hearts." --Goebbels

âoeWhoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.â --Nietzsche

Goebbels was smarter than Nietzsche, at least in this regard; he saw the process as inevitable. An evil regime might be crushed by force of arms, but the spirit it embodies can't be. And of course the same works the other way too, thus for example the Baltic states popped right back into existence as soon as Soviet oppression slipped. Humans aren't really sapient yet; we simply have some of our instincts dictated by memes rather than genes, and the process is unconscious. Becoming fully aware of it is likely the next big step forward, assuming we survive our current troubled childhood.

We all do, but there aren't enough resources to provide luxuries for 6 billion people.

He didn't ask for "luxuries" (what does that even mean? running potable water would be luxury in third world), he asked for security. There's enough resources to feed, clothe, house, and connect everyone, even if you assume most companies are so economically inefficient they'll have to close doors once their employees have any options besides destitution.

No, the real reason those on top will fight tooth and nail any changes is that they'd lose their power if those under them could flip them the bird and walk away in reality, not just in theory. But they don't ultimately have options: they can't provide enough jobs at sufficient pay level to keep the current system going, since then their competitors will undercut them and/or the shareholders will oust them, and they can't stop using more and more automation, which will make the situation worse and worse. The change is coming, with the same logic of marketplace that rised them up corroding the foundations of their power. The only questions that remain open are where we'll end up, and how many people get killed on the way there.

They had already gotten what they worked for.

No, they hadn't. As the judge noted, the company had not fulfilled its contractual obligations towards them.

They were stamping their feet and demanding severance money from a company that didn't have the money, and not caring if they destroyed the company and the lives of the superior employees who still worked there.

They were demanding money that the company owned them. If the company had accumulated debts it couldn't pay that's the CEOs fault.

But your comment about "superior employees" piques my interest: do you think someone who's "inferior" in some way should not only lose, but internalize their defeat so they'll be submissive to their "superiors"? Is that the world you authoritarian libertarians - for a lack of better description - want to see?

Nasty, stupid children acting just as expected.

Do you also make such comments when the bank or other company demands you pay your debts? Or is it just the peons who have obligations to their liege lords?

Yes, I think I understand you now. Authoritarian libertarian. Didn't think it was possible, but I guess human creativity is truly boundless, especially when you wouldn't want it to be.

Unless the government pays them on behalf of the bankrupt company,

Sure, why not? Seems to me like that would be an excellent way to stimulate economy, letting people working for startups concentrate on their jobs rather than whether it's time to jump ship. And as a nice side bonus it'd help make "unofficial" employment less attractive.

You could even take it a step further and have the state pay the entire payroll for a startup, and deduct it from any money you take out of the company or get from selling it. Sure, you'd lose some to fraud, but it would still be a step up from the current method of giving money to banks and large companies who then pay every single cent as dividends and bonuses.

Isn't "enlightened self interest" the whole fucking point of capitalism?

No, making as much money as possible is the whole point of capitalism. And if you screw over others to make more profits said profits are yours, while the costs are public. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and it's slowly but surely destroying the entire system. A welfare state could manage the damage, but is currenly unfashionable, and frankly it seems the society is going - if it hasn't already - over the tipping point where the vicious circle of poverty leading to damaged infrastructure leading to economic problems and more poverty can't be stopped anymore.

That only works once. You get yours (maybe), nobody else will have the opportunity to get anything. In this case it appears the terminated employees will get less than they would have if they had compromised rather than taking down the company.

Compromises require trust: you have to be able to trust the other party to be negotiating in good faith, rather than just buying time while they're hiding the valuables. There's been too many instances of the latter for any such trust to exist. And no system can work once people lose faith in it.

I think you're underestimating your own shelf life there. I know from personal experience that most people in their 60s are capable drivers (provided they were capable drivers to start with -- age doesn't imply competence). What they have lost in reaction time and processing ability (which is not as much as previous generations at the same age), they are able to compensate with experience. Just by handling less information through better front-end filters, they solve the problem just fine. At some point the two curves will cross, at which point it does become time to hand over the keys, but for healthy people this is probably going to be north of 70, and possibly even north of 80. By then, you might not even need to do the driving.

Even in my grandmother's generation (I'm about the same age you are), she didn't actually become a rolling hazard until she was pushing 80, and that was largely because she made navigation errors and then did stupid things to attempt to correct for them. The basic mechanics of driving and not hitting things still operated passably, although she really had no business being on the road. Fortunately, her circle of travel shrunk with her abilities.

The rich having extra children is not a problem. In fact, it's part of the solution to wealth inequality.

First, more kids means cutting the pie into more pieces. If that means more education costs, that's fine: we get more educated people, and through much of history, people from the privileged classes were the only ones getting higher education at all. We still managed to make some headway then, so this isn't a show stopper. It's far from ideal, but it's not going to destroy society, especially if it just means the proportions remain skewed toward the upper class rather than being entirely made up of them.

Second, when the parents finally do die, the fortune will be distributed among more children. This has historically been shown to break up empires.

Third, even if the top 1% has ten kids apiece (which they won't), while everyone else has just two, that results in them becoming the top 5%. This will increase the population far less than the other 99% finding ways to cheat, even if the 99% cheats less often per capita.

Fourth, this is a treatment of aging, which could arguably be classified as a disease in its own right. It is not immortality. If that means productive and high-quality life span is greatly increased, but total lifespan is still limited by other factors, then all we have to lose is the concept of societally funded retirement -- a notion some of us already see as impossible for ourselves, and that in many places never caught on in the first place.

This is a bit reminiscent of the movie Zardoz. Despite the low-budget element and Sean Connery's red diaper (nappies if you prefer) outfit, the basic premise of the movie is an intriguing one, and unlike a lot of "better" movies, the plot mostly makes sense.