Really? So why do they even bother if they know that it's not possible?

The problem is that politicians aren't necessarily in the business of common sense, and police departments need their revenue, just like any other third world country. (And no, I'm not saying the US is a third world country, just that our police departments behave like one. Though third world countries may even be a little more honest, because they don't hide the fact that they need bribes to keep working.)

Remember how Chuck Schumer ordered the DOJ to seize their domain name, and was royally pissed when he found out that there was no domain name to seize? He doesn't give a shit about Silk Road being more safe than street dealers, rather in his own pathetic little mind, he seems to think that you can keep a hippie off of drugs by just hiding his joints. But in his defense, that is a common theme amongst his fellow democrats who also happen to think that banning guns will 100% keep them out of the hands of criminals as well.

Or the US government could suddenly declare that genetic engineering is subject to DEA oversight, subjecting that particular field to a dark age.

Which given the US government's stupidly overzealous substance control laws, it's not far removed from being a reality.

Better call Saul.

Which one hurts more when dropped on you: a pound of iron, or a pound of feathers?

You're referring to the law of threes. That isn't due to collusion, rather it's due to how consumers tend to develop brand loyalty. It manifests particularly hard in the tech sector where independent developers tend to pick two platforms to support and ignore the rest. Microsoft has been fighting this tooth and nail with their windows phone platform, which can't seem to catch a break, because the other two players have everybody's attention.

In their defense, it is because eEconomics perfectly follows t his Douglas Adams quote:

As soon as an algorithm is created that can accurately predict the market, investors will start using it, thus altering the market so the algorithm no longer works.

This kind of economic theory is really attaching a name and a measurement system to a phenomena that is already understood. To say the Q-value predicts bubbles is a bit backwards since the Q-value is defined in terms of bubbles. So it really isn't a predictor of anything, any more than a ruler is a predictor of the length of an object or a scale is a predictor of the weight of an object.

You must be new.

Will it have one hump, or two?

Just so you know, everything you just said also applied to Irish and Gypsies. What you said however does not apply to hispanics. Yet, AA applies to hispanics and not Irish or Gypsies.

So how do you explain that one?

In such a scenario, I imagine that people who don't do anything at all will still feel entitled to have it all, kind of like occupy wall street.

Exactly. The only way it will be possible to run out of jobs is if there truly was nothing left for anybody to do. If that day ever came, (will it? who knows) then we'd be living in the universe imagined by Gene Roddenberry where there's no more need for money.

Before you espouse socialism, understand what it is first. Socialism means that the government takes over the means of production, which is destructive on the economy for the same reason that monopolies are destructive (socialism effectively is the same thing as a monopoly.)

What you're describing is welfare, not socialism.

That said, I really don't think you're fit to give economic advisement to anybody.

If we put these doomsayers back about 40 years, they'd say the sky is falling for the telecom industry when switchboard operators were being replaced with automated circuit switching systems.

Some of medium.com's articles are really good, especially the ones about physics. But some of them (like this one) are either based on hearsay or make some really dumb assumptions.

Take for example the map they show that indicates that most of the states have trucking as their top income sector. If we rolled back the clock about 150 years, that entire map would show farming. 90% of the US population were farmers at that time. However as the industrial revolution progressed, those people moved away from farming and towards other sectors.

Right now what we're seeing is basically another industrial revolution, which began somewhere around 1995, something I myself want to refer to as the information revolution. Information technology (IT) is advancing at such a high rate that its encroaching into other sectors that previously had nothing to do with computers.

Where medium (and these other doomsayers) are going wrong is they just assume that overnight suddenly 10 million people will be out of a job. That isn't at all accurate. The trucking industry will probably continue to grow for about 5 more years, and after that it will see a slow but steady decline until it has very few members remaining, and those few members will retain their jobs. There will probably be far fewer people driving trucks, but more people managing them (be that route planning, load planning, maintenance, etc) because the number of trucks on the road is likely to continue increasing for the foreseeable future.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Meanwhile Luddites will continue to be Luddites.

You're dead wrong. You know a job is needed when somebody is willing to pay you to do it. When I was doing my PC repair business in college, I would love to have had a sales person who could track down leads and find me customers. It would have made my work much more profitable, because people are looking for that all the time, however I don't have the skills to find them. Salespeople do.