The same thing that happened to the ice cutters, coffee bean sorters, switch board operators and hundreds of other obsolete jobs.

There are lots of jobs for people without higher education. When we reach the development level where everything that unqualified people can do is being done by robots, we can also give everyone a home and food and other shit for free.

And I thought I just called the CEO of one of those "sharing economy" companies a greedy liar. I'm not a fan of this new buzzword, and frankly speaking half of it is scams. But if we're talking about cars, Lyft and Uber are not the future and I'm surprised people pump billions into them when their business will be obsolete in ten years. They really expect an ROI so quickly?

Maybe that's a thing in your area? With a single exception, all the car-sharing cars I've used for the past few years have been fine and on the level of taxis except for a little more dirt on the floor (and only the floor).

Thanks to the used car market, the price of buying a car is not the problem. The cost and hassle of maintaining one is. If you don't need a car every day, it's simply not worth it.

The ones I use have agreements with the city that they can park on any public parking spot for free, even if you need to pay with your private car there. I don't know if they pay a yearly flat sum to the city or if the city sees it as a quid-pro-quo deal because of the reduced space usage and traffic.

Yeah, I just don't get that attitude. Well, when you own a Lambo or a vintage car or something that's special, yes I get that. But "this Honda Civic is mine, it's so special from the other 20 mio. that came off the same production line" - sorry, I don't get that.

Agreed, sometimes you get a car just before they take it for cleaning and washing and it's a little dirty. But in several years of doing this, I had one car that was actually so dirty I would've taken the next one if I hadn't been in a rush. Most of the time, they're more clean than most private cars I know.

And this thinking that there are all the ghosts of everyone who has ever been in the car is too irrational for me. People who sit in a car do not leave behind a magical aura that affects you three days later.

That's because you consider it an additional room in your house. I know people who do that, but I never did even when I had a car there was almost nothing in it. Note that I didn't say self-driving car-sharing will replace all private car ownership, that would be stupid. But it will replace taxis and ride-sharing.

They're equipped with GPS, you sign up with your drivers license to these services and unlock the car with an RFID card. So basically they know who you are and that it was you who took the car.

That's a really great thought. Better yet: You can program the car to allow only a set of destinations, so the kids can hop in and get home, but not get lost somewhere else.

There's a lot telling that in a long post you zeroed in on the one word that triggered you.

So much subtle aggression. Go outside, the weather is beautiful today.

Yes, I live in the city - Lyft and Uber don't exactly serve the countryside, do they? The rest is not your business and is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I'll tell you what the future is, and the CEOs of Lyft, Uber, etc. know it as well:

Self-driving car-sharing vehicles.

I'm a huge fan of the new car-sharing services that have popped up in recent years. The ones where you simply pick up a car wherever you find it (your iPhone App will show you the nearest ones if you are looking), drive to where you want, and leave it there for the next person to take.

You have a car when you need it, don't need to bother with it when you don't, you don't need to worry about fuel, inspections, washing it - nothing. And you can take the car you need for today. Good weather? Cabrio. Need to transport something? Bigger trunk. etc.

Main disadvantage? Sometimes there's no car nearby, and of course the usual parking space hunt in the city.

Solution: Self-driving cars. Tap a button on your smartphone, the nearest car comes and picks you up. Just exit it at destination and it'll go away by itself, either finding a parking space or going to the next person who called one. If it's an electric car, it can also go and find a charging station if it wants.

Who needs taxis? Who needs Lyft?

They know this, of course, and they know it's coming.

Ignoring them doesn't work so well, either. You miss the point where your "ANYTHING" includes nothing - if you do nothing, they will make something up. Heck, look how the right-wing christians in USA speak of being prosecuted.

Welcome to the real world, I see you have arrived very recently. Please take care of the cars - we have excellent collision detection but things actually hurt here. Also notice that you will have to breathe, sleep and piss in this world. Everything is more complex here, including ethics and politics. You will find that your simplified 1-2-3 answers do not apply to the real world very often, and you will need to use more of your brain than you are used to.

But aside from some difficulties, it's pretty cute and the sex and food are real. You should try them.

Nonsense. The big problem was the "not invented here" syndrome. I started writing HTML in about 1998 or so, maybe earlier, and IE has always been a PITA because it always had its quirks and wanted to be treated special. Everyone else was at least trying to implement the standard, MS attitude was basically to fuck it from both sides and approaching the Internet with a "you will write this stuff the way we want" attitude.

So, which one of these two conflicting goals do they actually wish to achieve?

Other than taxation, the system doesn't require a perfectly accurate assessment. The point is not to give Joe Rich the $134,942.50 fine he deserves, but to give him a fine he actually notices instead of the $50 flat fine that he'll light his cigar with, laughing "I'll do that every day from now on, it's fun".

So yeah, he goes and hides half his wealth and we only fine him $60k - he'll still notice that and laugh a lot less.

There's advertisement on the Internet? You poor fool must be surfing without an ad blocker, who inflicted such cruel and unusual punishment on you?

TV is a declining medium. 15 years ago, when I removed the TV from my home, I was an exotic. Since then, more and more people I meet also don't have a TV, especially young people. And a lot of the others use it to watch movies from DVD or download/streaming, not any TV station.

It's big still and thanks to exclusive deals for events like olympics and world cups, it will stay around for many more years, but it's a medium on the way to exit, and two generations from now it will be part of media history like gramophone records or cassette tapes.

Innovation in this area will only speed up its decline. Heck, even the "Apple TV" thing doesn't really do television - it replaces television with iTunes media consumption.