The thread is populated by leftists, whose entire ideology is based around the industrial revolution. They can't even conceive of a post-industrial world, because it would put them out of business.

And, yes, the transition to digital and home manufacturing will make the cost of living implode. If I don't need piles of DVDs and books, because it's all just bits on a hard drive, I don't need rooms to store them. If I can build most of the things I need on a 3D printer when I need them, I don't need to keep many things at all around when I'm not using them. I may not even need a house at all.

But, no, rather than deal with reality, the leftists fantasize about the GLORIOUS WORKERS RISING UP TO SEIZE THE ROBOT FACTORIES FROM THE EVIL 1%!

Which is why anyone of clue should just laugh at them. Who needs the Glorious People's Resource Allocation Committee telling them what to do when they have a 3D printer in their garage?

The real story here is automation putting leftists out of a job.

And, uh, who's going to be paying the taxes, when no-one is working?

Are you seriously claiming that humans won't be able to find anything useful to do that others will pay them for?

Take a look at documentaries from the 40s to 60s, at the peak of the making-humans-work-like-machines era, marvel at how much utterly monotonous work people used to be forced to do because we didn't have the technology to replace them with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS! and then marvel again at how, despite replacing all those people with EVIL ROBOTS TAKING OUR JOBS!, most people who want to work can still find a job.

It's the people who claim that EVIL ROBOTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS! who are basing their position on faith, not facts. It's just another tiresome leftist ploy to steal money from the productive to give to the unprductive.

No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans. Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.

You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.

You don't get it, you see. The leftists I know tell me that the factory owners won't be able to sell stuff if the rest of us don't have money, so they'll give money to the government to give to us, so we'll be able to buy their stuff and they'll get rich.

It's clearly insane, but it apparently makes perfect sense in Lefty Logic.

The left are the greediest people on the planet ('all your stuff belong to ME!'), which is why they hate everyone who has more stuff than they do.

Didn't you hear? The future is going to be post-scarcity and stuff. So no-one will have to worry about where resources come from. We can all have our own Death Stars built by robots from unicorn farts.

Hasn't this been common knowledge among SF readers for years?

Yeah, and?

If the NIMBYs want to make life inconvenient for others, why shouldn't it be made inconvenient for them, too?

Here's the actual Godwin's Law, as stated by Godwin:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"

That's it. It's true, it's kind of amusing, it's otherwise pointless.

The new, improved, Godwin's Law is: "If anyone says anything about Nazis, I can shout 'Godwin's Law' and shut down the discussion".

The only people who benefit from that are Nazis, because they can shut down any discussion about Nazis. No sane person should ever use the fake 'Godwin's Law', or defend it.

'Godwin's Law' in the idiotic modern interpretation, is primarily used to defend the actions of Nazis.

'You said you want to muder all Jews. You're a Nazi!'
'Ha-ha. Godwin's Law! You lose!'

I'm sure I remember Godwin once saying how embarrassed he was about the whole thing.

Didn't Microsoft lay off thousands of QA testers a few months back?

I have smaller Green drives that have been running 24/7 for five or six years with no user-visible problems. A couple of them are reporting 1 or 2 bad sectors, but that's it. None of the smaller Green drives have yet failed, with up to 45,000 power-on hours. But maybe I just got unlucky with the 3TB version.

They don't constantly speed up and slow down, and I disabled the head parking.

There's a few watts if you have a bunch of them in a RAID. And there's a significant difference in price, or was when I last bought some.

I've never seen as many bad drives as the 3TB WD Greens, but about 80% of mine are still working fine, and I only had to replace one early. The oldest now has nearly 30,000 power-on hours.

The left hate poor people. They want to force them out of work and make them reliant on the state, so they'll vote for left-wing governments.