My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.

An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.

Cryptocurrencies in their current incarnation are so stupid because they suck power needlessly, to create something of psychological value only because it is scarce. They are increasing scarcity of power, to create a psychological unit assigned a psychological value because it is scarce. It doesn't make sense, not economically, physically, scientifically.

The only way bitcoin makes sense is psychologically, and the psychology is a sociopathic, "I got mine Jack keep your hands off my stack" pathology. It is creating a number and calling it valuable, and taking up energy for this psychological money creation exercise.

It would be a little better if they were actually advancing knowledge with their mining operations. Make it like SETI@home, have it do some processing that helps us know more about the universe.

I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.

An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.

The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?

Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.

Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).

I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.

We produce a huge food surplus. There is no opportunity cost.

The capital investment can be volunteered, or supplied by government which can finance spending at zero cost by borrowing from the Fed, which returns interest to the Treasury and can keep the loans rolling over forever.

Wikipedia required a capital investment, but effectively its articles are being handed out for free. Why not robots?

It has a psychological effect because ignorant economists use limited knowledge about the universe to justify austerity policies. Friedman using TANSTAAFL, for example. Except now Dark Energy violates TANSTAAFL, and it didn't hold in General Relativity anyway. So we suffer from an artificially imposed scarcity of money because economists suffer from a lack of knowledge about the universe.

The universe seems to be expanding faster and faster. Dark Energy is coming from nowhere to do that work.

Didn't you get the memo? Hemp seeds are better than graphene. Plus you can get high while growing the seeds.

Yes, like Simon Newcomb proved we had hit limits in heavier-than-air flight, in 1903!

In the October 22, 1903, issue of The Independent, Newcomb made the well-known remark that "May not our mechanicians . . . be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope, and give up all attempts to grapple with it?"

Eh, which stuff? The head in the sand tactic only gets you so far even ostriches do not actually do that but some humans apparently rely on that not to lose footing in their narrow perception of reality.

The problem is that the "new environments" you mention are mostly social. You have to fit in with the company, because most of the non-human-interfacing parts have been automated. So work becomes a social network, rather than about efficiency of production. If you aren't good at social skills, you have no place in the modern business world.

So let government provide a basic income, and let the socially awkward innovate disruptively on their own, without the pressure to try to fake "normality".

"there was a vast layoff of "middlemen financial types" at the end of the financial bubble."

Aw, did they get their multimillion dollar bonuses first at least?

I'll start with the last: the Constitution expressly grants the government the power to coin money, and regulate the value thereof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

The market does not lift everyone out of poverty, even when the surplus produced allows it. That is when Government should step in to create money to help people in need.

As for Hoover, he didn't do enough. Addicted to balanced budget fetishism, he raised taxes in a depression. Expansionist monetary policy was needed, or fiscal deficits. Hoover was ideologically opposed to such measures. Roosevelt went a little farther but his reticence on spending probably caused the Depression to drag on.

That the government could sustain deficits was proved by World War II.

Your wikipedia quote does not present a neutral point of view. It's an ideologically-inspired rewrite of history by shameless libertarians. Wikipedia editors, please take note.

Buy one, or make it yourself from open source plans, and it will replicate. Or 3D print one. Cost of robot effectively drops to zero, like making a baby.

The market works against such sharing, of course. Managers (not the engineers themselves) impose artificial restrictions such as copyrights, patents, trade secrets. The market wants to hoard information, which is not in the General Welfare. Government should balance such a market approach by providing means for individuals to share with each other openly.

We have reached the technological stage where we easily produce enough surplus to give everyone a decent standard of living. If some person withholds food for purely ideological reasons, choosing to let it rot while people starve, he is being sociopathic. Government is mandated to feed people when they are starving. The market is not.

- first of all what is 'special' is that for the first time more companies shut down in a year than were started.

Secondly, you are right, existing companies are 'filling voids', as in they consolidate because the unproductive American workers can no longer earn enough by producing something to trade with. You are saying that consumption is the bottleneck, it's never the bottleneck, the problem is lack of productivity on behalf of the American worker. All these so called 'productivity gains' in the last 40 years in America are actually inflation and not gains of productivity. Productivity in USA has been completely annihilated with the laws, taxes, inflation. If American worker was productive, American worker would be able to earn to consume. American worker cannot earn to consume because he is not productive enough to pay for productivity of others with his own productivity, thus USA has been running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits, for this exact reason.

Capital is completely dried out in the USA, you don't have capital, you have inflation - printing of the money by the Fed and borrowing by all levels of government and by the private sector, but there are no savings, which is why there are no net new companies that replace the old companies that shut down and too many old companies shut down, and all of it is because there are no savings. There is no capital, printing money does not provide capital it only steals savings from the savers, savings are punished in the USA. The low interest rates artificially forced by the Fed are not true cost of capital. The pensioners in USA can no longer afford to live on savings, so they are coming back into the work force, while the younger who should be working are getting laid off and shift from permanent jobs to one or two or more than two part time jobs, all thanks to the government unauthorised nonsense, including Obamacare. As to ideas, ideas without capital behind them are nothing at all.