Ah, really? Well then you first then as your characterization of the existence of poor people in today's society "gives you a way to keep them in their place" is a typical lie of those claiming that others need to give more to make the problem go away.

I'm not asking you, or anyone, to give anything. I'm simply pointing out that the AC's attitude, that of someone making 20 times as much as someone else as well as holding all the power in the situation yet still believing themselves to be the victim is precisely the kind of self-deception that makes poverty possible in the first place. And I also claim this is not an accident, but an intentional aim of our current social structure - poverty exists to ensure factories have an unending supply of desperate labour, or more generally, that there's people who both hold all the power in and have every reason to support the system.

Basically, the AC followed his cultural programming which makes him unable to see the basic absurdity in what he posted, and you followed yours which prompts you to attack any perceived criticism of the basic assumptions of the system - in this case unequality and one-sided dependence - and apparently you picked an old Cold War relic memetic program to type the actual text. Or possibly got one from an old archive or something. Which is what I'm trying to figure out.

So, did you grow up during the Cold War, or...?

Humiliation? WTF? How's that work? It's not humiliating, it's frustrating.

Neither is appropriate for when people refuse to care about your orders because you don't have any authority over them. You aren't paying so you aren't in any position to demand features, or anything else.

Like I said, it's the "you're not my boss, fuck you" attitude that really turns people away.

It's not "you're not my boss, fuck you" but "you're not my boss, so stop giving me orders". Altough I suppose "fuck you" could very quickly follow if you refused to take the hint.

The attitude you just displayed right there. Are you a developer on any open source projects?

So disagreeing with you is "fuck you" to you? Seriously?

If software companies are upset that we're obstinately staying with older versions of their products, instead of paying for the latest and greatest, the answer might be simply "I know how to use this version, and I don't want to spend hours with each new revision trying to figure out where you've hidden the button this time."

More to the point, the concept of "product" was part of Industrial Age and simply doesn't make sense in Information Age. In the world of plenty a business model based on scarcity requires you to create artificial scarcity and inevitably makes you a villain. It also doesn't work. Current software companies stay afloat because Information Age is only dawning, and the old myths - the values and patterns of behavior consider the "default" - of Industrial Age have held dominance; but as economy leaves industrial production a niche, just like it did agriculture earlier, copyrights and their underlaying ideas if "software is property" will lose what little power they still have and selling software will become impossible.

So what will replace it? Perhaps some kind of "work for hire" model. In this model, software houses didn't have products, rather they'd implement new features and polish existing ones, maybe funded through something like Kickstarter. Then again, it's possible that, as Information Age progresses and the new model becomes the default, the entire concept of property will simply crumble. After all, if a robot built by other robots builds a doohickey from materials mined by yet more robots, why should it "belong" to anyone? If I want one, I can just tell the robots to build one; if you want one, you can tell them to build one too. Nobody needs to be paid.

If this happens - if production will become a background process like trees making oxygen, unlike the entire focus of human existence like it currently is - then future will basically be a communist utopia developing, as Marx predicted, when ideological - currently capitalistic - covering of the society has outlived its usefulness and said society sheds it, like it has many others previously. Which may or may not be enough to stop gratuitous changes to user interface.

Why should an old person learn to use (in rapid succession) CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Flicker, Pinterest, Instagram (and so on and so on), instead of his relatives putting a little effort into hand written letters and face time?

Because those handwritten letters and face time are going to become a chore very soon, and chores have a tendency to be "forgotten", especially when they only exist in the first place because their benefactee is too lazy to invest into learning modern communication methods.

If you make it hard for other people to stay in contact, they probably won't bother.

It's just the "fuck you" attitude that gets to us. When users demand features, you are supposed to listen. But nope, this stock answer is trotted out every time as a way to avoid doing work.

But it's not work. The developers are free to listen to you, and they're also free to ignore you. You aren't their boss. Refusing to treat you like you were isn't "fuck you". You just took it that way because getting rejected is humiliating and you didn't want to admit you misunderstood the situation.

It's so much better when the commisar decides & comes in to take all your excess food, right komrade? Make everyone poor so that none can complain that any are poorer!

You know, if you feel the need to lie about your opponent to make yourself look good, then that usually means you are the bad guy.

Or was it your indoctrination speaking? Some old Cold Warrior reliving their youth? A kid who thinks Red Scare is fashionable? Inquiring minds want to know how you got from "I guess this explains why we still have beggars" to "Make everyone poor so that none can complain that any are poorer!"

If I work everyday to earn twenty dollars, and every day you ask for a dollar, eventually I'm going to get tired of supporting you when I have my own financial issues to worry about.

If your income is twenty times mine, and even that pittance is dependent on pleasing you, and you still have the nerve to play the victim, then it seems to me that my best option would be to start a revolution and put your head on a stick. I have nothing to lose but my chains, after all.

Even if the money was printed and then given to the IMF, the moment the money was printed, the value it has came from devaluing all of the other money in circulation.

This is only true in an economy that's already working at 100% capacity. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. In the current situation of idling economy some actor getting more money will likely simply activate idle production capacity, which will actually increase the size of the market and the value of existing money.

Of course, the whole idea that supply exceeding demand can cause a crisis speaks for the absurdity of the entire economic system. It might be best to focus efforts on coming up with its replacement.