Yes, our free market capitalist system is much more advanced. The Wall Street cleptocracy already has chauffeurs.

Justin Bieber is an Inhibitor?!

TFA is a dot on the trend line of parental and educational laziness, IMHO. Parents slough off responsibility for their kids' educations to schools of questionable quality. The schools in turn palm of their work to computers. It's sad, and the only effective remedy is parental re-involvement.

I knew the schools sucked when my son was reading 3 grade levels above his peers at age 6. Now he's a sophomore in High School, and further along (knowlege-wise) toward his BSEE than most e-school juniors because I take the time to not just nurture and encourage but actually teach him at whatever level he is ready for. He's 15, and has built his own Siemens S7 PLC lab project. His science classmates won't get Ohm's Law till next year. Pity them.

We can blab all day about how to fix teh skoolz, but when it comes to your own kids, give them your best. As a parent, you owe it to them. The schools aren't going to do it for you.

We had such rules once. I think we called them the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

They used to work pretty good, until we started allowing the will of the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street to supplant the will of the people.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.

I wonder if the judge will be able utter the phrase "dismissed with prejudice" while laughing his robe off.

The gods themselves strive in vain to improve PowerPoint usage.

Denier is certainly more polite than what they really are: idiots.

+5 Insightful

Aye, there's the rub. What indication is there that economic conditions, beyond those for the 1%, will improve?

Since one cannot undo history, it makes more sense to just get on with it than to merely sit in the mud and cry about evil colonial powers that left 50 years ago.

How's that working for you in Bangladesh and Zaire? We have what are essentially experimental laboratory results (I think we call them revolutions) to invalidate any proposed "economic" solution.

Disclaimer: I've been an industrial automation engineer since the PLC-2 and System 1 were king. I'm still at it, killing jobs wherever possible. Not out of malice, nor with any joy in that, but just doing my job.

TFA may be authored by a fuzzy-headed economist, but the core concept is undeniable. Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world. This trend can be compared to the situations in a lot of 3rd World countries. The industrialized nations, once fully built-out with AI and AA (Advanced Automation) will become 3rd world societies too. We're getting close to the tipping point already. There are only so many burgers to be flipped, and consumers with enough money to buy them.

Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world? All the attendant unrest and upheaval will not be pretty.

My own solution: Enable and reward birth control wherever possible. Not as efficient as famine or genocide, but much less nasty.

Yeah, a social model where 99.9% of society endures scarcity while .1% enjoys a surplus.

Since when was Ayn Rand a rocket scientist?

+5 Sad but so.