If that 6 cents were no biggie, then why does Aldi make you pay it?

6 cents is no biggie. 6 cents * n customers is. Furthermore, why should those who who bring their own bags subsidize those who don't?

If that quarter for the buggies were no biggie then why do they make you pay it?

Most likely it's not a payment but a safety deposit: put the buggie where you got it and you get your quarter back. It's a pretty effective way of making people clean up after themselves.

Memorization typically isn't practical skills. Outside of certain specific career fields, naming things like the 'most important' 20 battles of the US Civil War, the dates they took place in, and the generals involved are not that useful outside of the specific class.

Being able to work a spreadsheet/budget is a very practical in many areas, but isn't necessarily 'critical thinking'. I think a better point to say than that would be problem solving. Is the potential employee capable of solving everyday problems that may crop up, without the assistance of a manager? That's also useful.

My very secure password, is well over 100 bits of entropy. Easily extendable when the time comes.

But that is not the problem. We're using a Secret for single factor identification. Real identification is multi-factor and requires non-secret means for identity, and then a secret for proof of identity. Non-secret identification requires a web of trust. Online systems have neither non-secret web of trust Identification nor proper secret proof of Identification.

If there ever was a +6 Funny, this is the one.

"...so that kids didn't need to learn how to solve them."

I don't think that's actually the *purpose* of the app, any more than the calculator was invented so that kids wouldn't have to learn how to add or multiply.

It's a correlation/causation problem, though. Most engineers are in the top 10% of compensated workers in this country and are of the delusion that since they work hard and get paid well than anyone can work hard and get paid well. They also tend to be predominantly male and white. They also, generally, come from higher socieoeconomic backgrounds. That doesn't necessarily make them right of center, but those tend to be the demographics of the right side of the aisle, regardless of their "logic" or "critical thinking" ability.

If you put a Bitcoin wallet on a USB flash drive and hand it to someone the transaction is not recorded anywhere.

Which means there's nothing stopping me from going home and moving the coins in the wallet I just gave to another one, leaving it empty.

There is no way to know how many people the wallet passed through before the coins resurface in public transactions again.

If I give away a wallet I received from someone else I risk being held accountable if whoever gave it to me spends the coins in it. So even if I accepted a wallet rather than a transaction to an address I control, I'd still need to transfer the coins to one generated by me before using them.

So no, you can't trade Bitcoins without making the transaction public. Not without total trust to everyone you trade with, and everyone they trade with, and so on. But if you have that, why not just use pen and paper - or, better yet, just abandon bookkeeping completely and share everything, since you trust everyone to not abuse the arrangement?

I'm sure there are some differences between these and classical virus structure, in some way, but given my ignorance of the subject, they walk and talk like viruses.

And, who knows, might actually be how viruses originated.

It's damaged (unusable by the user) until they get a tool from the people who damaged it. Sounds like extortion to me.

Some years ago most of the population spent its time working in the field. Now agriculture employs about 3% of population. So, do these 97% of other guys starve or what?

Why do you think communist revolutions happened? And why did their agitators use such rhetoric as "you have nothing to lose but your chains"?

We'll need human jobs anyway until develop AI (and that's not going to happen in any foreseeable future).

"AI" is a nebulous term. A modern computer processor contains over 1 billion transistors; do you think a human being placed them all? AI runs factories, AI diagnoses illnesses, AI plans logistics, AI flies airplanes... What's missing is a general AI that can adapt to any task, but any particular task can be automated.

People will find another values that can't be produced by robots.

Perhaps. But here's the thing: the remaining farmers need products of industrial workers, just as badly as those industrial workers require food - after all, the farmer has only 3% or so of his pre-industrial workforce remaining, so he can't farm without a tractor and fuel. On the other hand, neither the farmer nor the industrial worker need, say, a barber. It's a luxury they can cut out by trimming their own hair. And the same goes to every other "value" anyone might produce. That's why the service industry and the entertainment industry are almost universally minimum wage jobs despite having some superstars who make millions. Selling luxuries to a group that keeps getting smaller and poorer is a losing proposition.

I wish I had mod points for you.

The government has the power and the right to do as it wishes with its currency,

REally? Where exactly is THAT power listed in the constitution that enumerates the limited powers and responsibilities of the US Govt?

OTOH, FedEx and UPS don't look like the sort of places where you'd want to eat.

McDonalds took a 30% hit in earnings. It didn't help that they were passing out pamphlets to employees on how to apply for food stamps. I had a friend who took her kids there all the time, but even she was revolted when she heard that and they never went there again.

Data is not copyrightable. Your posts extolling the virtues of free living and your treatise on the need for end to end encryption in email would be completely safe from sale, but your height, weight, dog's name, friend list, favorite meal, phone number and the fact that you spoke often of your hemorrhoids is all just data about you which is non-copyrightable.

The ability to even write a licence where you retain your data and still give them permission to transmit it to a third party (the entire reason for a site with more than a single user) without potentially opening them to liability in the case of a disgruntled user would have to be a masterpiece of lawyering.

That makes no sense.

Look at it from a macro-economic perspective: The reason we're moving to automation is because it increases efficiency, allowing us to produce more goods with fewer resources. That will increase average standard of living.

There are a couple of ways it could go wrong, of course. One is that the increased efficiency and therefore increased wealth could end up concentrated in the hands a small percentage of super-wealthy people. We've actually seen a lot of this over the last few decades, but we've seen it previously during other technology-driven economic restructurings as well, and what always happens is that competition eventually drives the margins of the super successful down and in the end the wealth ends up getting spread more broadly.

That points to the other way it could go wrong: The common man only gets his share of the increased wealth by doing something to earn it. Even though increased efficiency means there's more to go around, barring some sort of large scale government-driven redistribution, you still have to work for your share of it... which means you have to be able to do something that others who have wealth consider of sufficient value to pay you. So the other way it could go wrong is that there may simply be nothing available for such people to do.

That last is also a risk we've seen bandied about in past economic shifts, especially the shift from agricultural to industrial labor. What has happened in the past is that we've created new kinds of jobs doing previously unheard-of or even previously-frivolous things. I don't see any reason that this time should be different. I expect the transition to be painful -- and the faster it happens the more painful it will be -- but I don't think there's any end to what people want. People with resources will always want things that people without resources can supply. I don't claim to have any idea what those things will be.

It's also possible that I'm wrong, and that we'll have to take a socialistic approach to distributing the fruits of automation-driven productivity increases. I don't think so, and I think we should be careful not to move that direction too quickly, because it has huge negative impacts on productivity and we're going to need all of the productivity increases we can get, but it is possible.