Newton's mechanics can't build a GPS. Things we use everyday use physics Newton's alone can't predict or preduce.

What about mirror neurons? The brain can act on the story, producing an effect that feels the same as actually dropping a ball on your foot.

Take a placebo for asthma, then actually take asthma. Studies show that the perceived effect is the same. Thus, if you believe in it enough, your brain can fool you into believing any model.

Next program those models in holodecks, and you can actually experience a ball falling on your foot, when you're only "reading" a holonovel.

So does that mean that "Oh, really?" could also have been answered "yes", thereby disproving the statement that any headline question can be answered with "no"; or is the "no" denying the truth of the original assertion.

Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.

Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.

People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.

Xerox PARC didn't break even. But it contributed interfaces still in use.

Why does capitalism reward leaches so lucratively?

The idea of an ongoing struggle between results-oriented managers and technical visionaries is not new. Economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen noted it in his 1904 book The Theory of Business Enterprise.1 Eighty-some years later, John Kenneth Galbraith cited Veblen's view to describe a dynamic still at work in a more modern economy:

"The businessmen, for good or ill, keep the talents and tendencies of the scientists and engineers under control and suppress them as necessary in order to maintain prices and maximize profits. From this view of the business firm, in turn, comes an obvious conclusion: somehow release those who are technically and imaginatively proficient from the restraints imposed by the business system and there will be unprecedented productivity and wealth in the economy."

From Bridging the Gap Between Stewards and Creators.

Great example of the perverse incentives of capitalism. Selling provides a higher return than investing in technical innovation.

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.