Get a better life.

Um... Secure != Trustworthy and, seriously, most web connections DO NOT NEED to be HTTPS.

Furthermore, I cannot filter HTTPS via my proxy filter (Proxomitron) to strip out annoying things, like the fucking Google sidebar and other forced "user experience" settings - which is why I use nosslsearch.google.com ...

Direct-to-video with huge sales.

Unlike needing a full pressure suit, think scuba gear and a protective layer. The temperature at 52km is a bit chilly at 13C / 55F, but it is in many respects a lot more hospitable than a space station in orbit.

The clouds are made of sulfur dioxide - (SO2) which produces a sulfuric acid rain (H2SO4). So, mining that rain gives you H2O, or O2 and H2. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen, you can safely use H2 as your lifting gas, and not have the leakage problems that using monatomic helium gives.

Or you can look here.

But that's no longer true when you can increase production and lower labour at the same time, and everyone else in the supply chain is doing the same.

At some point, the surplus labour cannot be retrained to do "new" jobs because those jobs either already have a surplus of labour, or no longer exist, or they exist, but they're also automated.

At that point, "retraining programs" are just make-work projects (not to say that they mostly aren't already).

So, protesting a fictional, comedic film about assassinating their leader, the "Guardians of Peace" hack the studio that produced the film and then threaten violence against theaters showing and people who might watch the film. Wow. (I guess that's in line with people who follow a certain "Religion of Peace" threatening violence against those who draw, even respectful, images of their prophet because it's against said religion.)

Narrow minded people thinking mindlessly...

That would work if the "less work" was split evenly among everyone who wanted to work - then they would have the money to do fun stuff in their free time.

That hasn't happened. Productivity has doubled in the last 40 years, but real wages are stagnant, and the average work week hasn't gone down for those who work.

The worst part is that this trend is going to accelerate in the future, and more technology won't "fix" that.

The one thing overlooked wrt self-driving cars and other pervasive automation is that they will reduce demand for themselves as well. Who needs (or can afford) a self-driving car if they've semi-permanently become jobless through automation, and it's cheaper to take a self-driving taxi once in a while?

And who needs the office? The "virtual office" with "virtual secretaries", "virtual bookkeepers", "virtual sales staff", "virtual everything" will just be bits on a server somewhere. So all the associated jobs that kept that office tower running will cease to exist as well, so even less demand for self-driving cars to get to and from work.

That leads to the lessening of value of "prime office real estate," and all the knock-on effects that will have. So those robotic floor cleaners that did the office tower floors are now out of a job as well. Ditto the cafeteria robots, the toilet cleaning robots, etc., until those prime office towers are converted to - guess what - slum housing.

And since everything will be within walking distance, none of those "city-dwellers" will need self-driving cars, even if they could afford them.

Wow.

Isn't that what we've had for the last few hundred years?

Ya, but you'd already be 50km above the surface. How would that affect the launch budget?

Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008.

George H. W. Bush, George Bush, and now Jeb Bush trying for the job. No de facto dynasty there :-)

I used the phrase "thinkers", not "elites".

Those groups I "give credit" to are huge. I don't hesitate for a moment that there are members of those groups who have the intelligence at hand and the foresight to see where things are going and to prepare for them. Lumping everyone in those groups as either/or doesn't make sense.

Not sure what narrative you're alluding to.

My point is that eventually in this century more and more people, especially in the First World, will lose their jobs dues to technologies endless march.

Not sure where you get the "defining yourself as against something" either. The end of my post asks a question. Can you answer it?

Also, and most importantly, with all the arguments about whether true AI will ever really come about, etc really have no bearing at all on how technology will continue to destroy jobs. There is no denying that. From self checkout at the supermarket to self driving delivery trucks to kiosk style fast food to software that writes sports articles online. It is all coming, and none of it requires true AI.