But you pay taxes on 3/3 so the other third goes to Uncle Sam. You'll be lucky if you don't owe taxes beyond what you won in court.

Hanlon's Razor is absolutely essential in understanding things. It's because three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

So when other countries stop having faith in an infinite number of Yankee Dollars (which they will) and stop taking them you'll see the whole thing come crashing down

If someone has something the US wants to buy ( like oil ) then they'll just be bombed till they do. Soon enough the powers that be will realize this ( they already have ) and just take the dollars and accept living like the kings they are *within the system*. If you have power, do you ally with the winning side, or do you attempt to find a coalition of those being shat upon? If you have power, you personally aren't being shat upon, because you rationally sell out. It's those with no power who are being shat upon - the poor. So who exactly is there to oppose power?

Macheavellii would say that it's always better to ally with the weaker side because it increases your leverage and prevents you from becoming someone's bitch, but do you really CARE if you are someone's bitch? I mean who wouldn't rather be a billionaire than a king? You get all the perks without the stress/risk/culpability

And the fact is, most humans are redundant. The world is going through a sea change as big as the one that caused an end to serfdom and brought forth the enlightenment and the rights of man. Instead of people being valuable b/c of megadeath caused by the black plague, and new untapped worlds opening up around the world begging for humans to take advantage the world is filling up. Stuff is more valuable than people. Now that humans are not valuable, they will be treated worse than before. I wouldn't be surprise to see a rolling back of the gains made since the middle ages. Only megadeath would seem to have a chance of making humans more valuable relative to things.

UC Davis' Gregory Clark has some iteresting insights about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZlXaGEzwg&list=PLmq9H75aU8iNWq2oXfH2y82yH1HzaITpa

Also, technology during the industrial revolution pushed human labor into pursuits that could not be mechanized. With thought itself more and more mechanizable, what is left for humans? http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-articles-about-robots-2012-12 ?

Paris Hilton is very productive. ( in the economic sense where work done with a backhoe is more productive than work done with a hand shovel ) Her labors are mixed with a very high level of capital. And what do those labors consist of? Merely not losing her money. Does she need to be superior in any way to perform her duties? is there any meritocracy going on? Well...

She can and likely does hire a finanacial planner. Brains are a dime a dozen.

She buys $40,000.00 purses. So at first glance it would seem she does a poor job at not losing her money. But she can afford $40,000.00 purses. That doesn't realy represent substantial consumption. Giving away half her money to someone who's never had money would involve *massive* consumption. If she gave me half her wealth, I would probably give half of it away to people I know who would also spread the wealth themselves etc. This would cause *millions* of dollars in consumption. A $40,000.00 purse is nothing.

So it seems Paris Hilton is far better qualified than I to be wealthy.

But isn't it weird that she doesn't have to do anything but not consume?

All she needs to do to not give away her wealth is insulate herself from need and the temptation to give it all away. That is, she need only stay amongst the her own kind and not mingle with the peasants.

Societies that support this tendency win out militarily because those societies with the most capital will be able to field the most fearsome militariy might including robotic military might. There is no reason to suppose that without valuable labor to parlay into means to consume, that most humans will have franchise in the future. As human endeavor becomes worth less humans will perish.

And robots should they come to mainly comprise the military, work against the naturally democratizing nature of military power which is that if the military comes from the peasantry then they will not kill the peasantry. It's no accident that the nobility WAS the military in the middle ages. It's the most efficient way to keep power in the hands of the fewest consumers. Technology would seem likely only to increase the levereage power can concentrate with. How few could actually run the world? Maybe someday zero.

But it's also likely that with concentrated power technological progress would slow.

The concentration of wealth and power leads to monopolies. And monopolies maximize profit, not production. This may actually be 'greener' than the alternative where production is maximized. The forests of Europe still have game. Would this be the case if they weren't owned by the nobility?

With the world divided amongst powerful monopolies who would have the incentive to disrupt things with new technology?

I've been using Xubuntu for a while, and like it. I switched from Kubuntu when some update of some widget I never heard of and probably didn't use messed me up to the point that it was easier to reinstall than track down the problem. I am not sure what kind of user you are, but Xubuntu's philosophy of leaving things out you probably don't need is the balance that fits me best.

I've choked down some mealworms and crickets. Live and cooked. The biggest barrier between me and enjoying it, is the fact that I'm eating their digestive systems. I'm eating their poop. There's just no avoiding eating poop if you're eating bugs.

I bet they can own your computer if they want to. It's a whole new threat model you'd suddenly be dealing with. It would be VERY tough to live up to that. You wouldn't be able to do much at all without them knowing.

So I imagine Snowden sleeping on an uncomfortable plastic bench slurping ketchup packets and eating saltines. Is he gonna do that forever?

Yeah, I mean anyone with anything to hide will be using Tor. Are people too stupid to use Tor really a threat that the NSA needs to be brought to bear to worry about? The only ones who lose are private citizens. Unless you go to extraordinary lengths you won't be able to keep the NSA from connecting an old slashdot post with your real name. Who cares right? Not me, but the Internet isn't just about about now, what you say is for all time. If an evil dictator comes to power you can't quit saying stuff that might piss them off and go about your business. Anything you've already said when it was still OK to do so can be used against you.

Rather than just sprinkle keywords outside of sentences, the NSA would need a level of AI they probably aren't using to filter this garbage out:

I'm building a BOMB. A steak and cheese BOMB, that will land hard in my stomach and infect my insides with a deadly pathogen level of satisfaction. I will release the BOMB on American soil. I will do this by shitting outside creating a biological hazard of epic devestation.
I am going to call it the Allahu Ackbar AlQueda Steak and cheese BOMB. Every major metropolitan area is in danger from this BOMB. Millions will die! Of cholesterol and grease induced heart failure. The BOMB will create a radiological hazard that will make large areas uninhabitable. For other sandwiches once the word about how awesome tasting my BOMB is broadcast on the radio. I call advertising on the radio radiological warfare - radiological sandwich warfare that is. Yeah.
Maybe this post will make it to a human and eat up a few seconds of their time.

Naw, there'll always be someone who feels cornered etc. You can't let them push you around.

Terrorism ( and civil disobedience, a close cousin ) operate by goading a larger power into acting in a way that angers a populace who then feels sympathetic to your cause. It only works however if your larger power tempers the use of that power. Do you think Genghis Kahn had problems with terrorists? Do they have terrorists in the DPRK? They'll kill/imprison you, your family and anyone suspected of being the least bit terroristy and their families. I can't think of any terrorism at all in the ancient world. Everyone knew it would just result in genocide, and nobody with power felt particularly bad about that.

It's not even molding. Anyone can assess the merits of the latest fad and take the good leaving the bad. But most of any fad is just stuff we've seen before re-hashed. The young are seeing it for the first time and think they will be able to move mountains with their shiny new hammer.
The main thing those with the money to pay you want is the ability to throw dollars at the problem and get linear increases in performance. If there's a project that will take 6 months for one person, they want to be able to hire 6 people and get it in one month. They want this more even than the ability to complete similar projects in 6 weeks, or even 6 days, or 6 hours.
They want no learning curve. Make it simple enough for any skillset. Use crayons. If the code has any coherent archetecture, that's a learning curve. If you've used anything but crayons, then you've made hiring extra programmers more difficult. The only codeset that fits their bill is spaghetti code. With spaghetti code, nobody ever understands what's going on. Everyone just shits up the codebase to get their bit done, because it's impossible to understand what's going on enough to try anything clever, and generating anything more understandable than spaghetti code makes other people's lives who have to read your code easier while you spend your precious time cleaning up the spaghetti around you. And adding more people indeed produces a linear increase in output. The seasoned folks have no advantage over newbies.
If someone cares about throughput, it's because they don't have the money to pay you properly. And the spaghetti factories won't let you be worth paying properly.

Offices so handicapped by windows dependencies may find themselves more and more outpaced by more productive ones.

There's another thing at work in IT, at least, and probably everywhere else: If you spend the effort necessary to be good at your job, you don't spend that effort in getting your next job.

The most effective way I've noticed to be promoted in IT is to be incompetant at IT, then you spend all your time appearing to be doing something, and you seek the paperwork tasks involving lots of emailing and nagging, and checking off what is done and not done. You always appear more concientious than the guy who ignores emails for an hour so they can code.

Really any idiot can do this sort of thing, though it is stressfuli - you're lying for a living, and lies breed more lies - it becomes harder and harder to spackle things over so it's good to move around.

People gain the opportunity to try their hat at faking it ( which is all managers do as they can't really know the details they are in charge of managing ) by fooling someone into thinking they can code ( or do job x ) ( another fake it test ).

If you don't want a job, just suck at it. If you want a better job fake it till you make it ( which is a certain form of sucking at it ). But accept the fact that you'll be stressed out all the time. It's probably no worse than the alternative because shit rolls downhill, and there's plenty of shit to go around when everyone is an incompetant liar. You're gonna be stressed no matter what. Higher ups are not all Zapp Branigan having let their success go to their heads, ( though some are ). Some of them probably know exactly what they are. Kudos to them.

Justice is imperfect. There is a nonzero risk that you will be convicted of a crime you didn't commit. The fifth ammendment protects you from having to answer questions that might tend to incriminate you. If you are innocent, then you have an incentive not to answer such questions.

If there was a murder in a park, and they ask: Were you in the park on the night of the murder? Supposing you were both in the park and innocent, answering truthfully still might tend to incriminate you. Without the fifth ammendment, they might hold you in contempt for failing to answer ( torture you with incarceration ) until you tell them what they want to know and the answer *satisfies them*.

What if they have preconcieved notions they expect your story to be consistent with? What if the truth is not consistent ( to a reaonable doubt standard ) with their preconcieved notions. The defendant can't explain the discrepancy. Must they now fabricate a story consistant with preconcieved notions they may not even be aware of or be slapped with contempt?

Faced with two bad choices, the innocent defendant now has an incentive to lie. They may believe this is preferable to telling the incrimnating truth or enduring the torture, and they may be right. This incentive for innocent people to lie, unjustly ruins their credibility either by causing them to lie or by incriminating them, for it is unjust to incriminate the innocent.

Interrogators have all the advantages. They put questions looking for answers that confirm their preexisting biases. Without the fifth ammendment there is no defense against this and so prosecutors become nothing more than interrogators, with contempt of court charges the new torture implements.

It's a commodity with a limited supply.

The computing power to mine the coins will fall in value as long as moore's law persists. Any supposed intrinsic value is for the forseeable future destined to become ever more insignificant.

Though bitcoin itself may be in limited supply, digital currencies aren't. It's trivally easy to start another such currency with coins mined at low difficulty.

And the real bitcoin economy will adopt these competing currencies if they have anything at all to reccomend them because of Gresham's Law. People would rather spend money with high demurage than with low demurage, and it goes without saying that technical gains in security ease of use, transaction speed, ease of exchange with non-digital currencies ( and with stores ) will tend to favor myriad new digital currencies over bitcoin. And bitcoin already competes with higher demurage government issued currencies that are very convenient to use, though sometimes the transaction cost is high ( cc companies charge them to merchants ).

If anonymity is sacrificed to prevent fraudulent chargebacks, then some company might be able to facilitate instantaneous transactions for a fee and compete with the CC companies. One's spendable balance could be denominated in bitcoin or another digital currency and instantly changed into dollars when you spend at a store.

Of course that company would have the privelege necessary to get into it's customer's wallets, ( it would need to have this to do the exchange ).

Therefore the company might concievably loan out the bitcoins at interest to other customers in exchange for providing the convenience of instantaneous transactions. Most people wouldn't spend all their bitcoins so that company might shuffle bitcoins around in it's customer's wallets ( the collection of which would be called the vault ) so as to allow any one customer to remove their wallet with the same balance of bitcoins as they put in on demand.

This scheme would work until and unless the customers all wanted their wallets at the same time for some reason.

In the meanwhile, balances in excess of actual bitcoins in wallets on deposit would exist within the, let's call it what it is, fractional reserve bitcoin bank. These virtual bitcoins would circulate interchangably with bitcoins devaluing them.

People don't care much for anonymity day to day. They want it only sometimes, and nobody but criminals ( and criminal includes dissidents in oppressive regimes and other 'good guys' ) cares if it's government proof.

Will there ever be something peer to peer and decentralized that is as convenient as what a central clearing house can offer?

I doubt it but I am not sure. People may demand the central clearing house ( bank ). Will people change currencies in response to things like bank runs? Is this even possible? Is it legally possible to loan bitcoins? Will it remain legal if it is?

Is it possible to code an algorithm that governs the use of demurage to fund infrastructure ( centralized or not ) that can compete with a 'bank' in a way that can not be tampered with? One would think the algorithm would have to be adopted by it's users who vote with their feet even if the options they selected from were created by more technical people. Bitcoin which is open source has that going for it even if the coins themselves don't.