Ok, I don't use Facebook either, but I do use youtube. I don't have my real name associated with my account, and I only watch, not produce videos, so nobody would see my face. I uploaded a hand drawn face as my avatar.

I do have a real gmail account that I use for official business, but I never log into it with firefox. I keep an instance of chrome for all my real-world/real-name transactions that I don't use for anything else.

But I finally gave in and let google have my real phone number for password verification, both my real name and my pseudonym are now tied together by at least that. ( they probably had me pegged before that dispite polipo etc, but now they do for sure. )

Now youtube keeps asking me if I want to appear as blank picture ( MyUserName ) or my avatar picture ( MyUserName@gmail.com ). Though I would like to appear as my avatar picture ( MyUserName ). That's not a choice. So I choose a blank avatar. It was a cute hand drawn avatar that now nobody will see.. .

I think the thing to worry about is if you've already given your info and your identity is outed by some site you've signed into. If they know your real name, they can out you some day, so don't do anything interesting on their site.

I didn't directly use the backhoe, but used capital ( money ) to hire a backhoe. My labor was phoning in the request ( and also the other non-digging stuff I had to do for my home improvement project ). A backhoe is capital, money is capital. I was working for myself using my customer's money. My customer just happened to be me. If I didn't have the money, then I wouldn't have gotten the job done nearly as fast, or maybe not at all.

I don't think it said that we live in the event horizon. We're the nebula, right? And since it is a 4D nebula, we're only a tiny slice of it.

I love/hate these developments b/c I don't understand them but they're interesting, and why really? Why are they sometimes interesting even though I don't understand them?

Puff puff pass.

Maybe that's it.

Not arguing with your point but the way productivity is defined by economists, it is how much you produce with your labor, which of course depends on the capital you use. Since you are only one person you can only labor at most 24x7 if you were some kind of mutant that didn't require sleep, and could multitask while eating and using the bathroom.

You labor the same whether you use a hand shovel or a backhoe, but you are far more productive with the backhoe. However, 'being productive' doesn't somehow make you superior. For instance I hired someone with a backhoe to dig a trench after calculating that it would take me three months of digging with a shovel. Now, I've never used a backhoe, but I am sure that it would be quicker to learn even by trial and error than it would be to dig even a small amount of that trench with a spade.

And imagine how long it would take someone to scratch the trench out with no shovel but just a sharp stick!

In an economic sense productivity amounts to what capital you employ. You can sit on your ass and collect interest and be productive. Unproductive means poor.

The job is safe (for a while), but your wages aren't. There will be many who lose their job who will compete with you for yours.

Actually this might be humanities 'saving grace'. With all the 'excess' people gone, there might still be things like wildlife. If game weren't owned by the nobility, then the middle ages would likely have seen the end of game. Humans might be displaced by machines in the same kind of way the natives were displaced by the technologically superior white interlopers. Of course there will be a few humans running things for a while at least until a monopoly vertically integrates everything, and the last human who runs it all dies once their family becomes too inbred to reproduce.

What would people do without jobs

If they have pasive income, look to what those who don't need to work do now.

If they do not have passive income, then they starve.

No, being endowed with a trust fund is far superior. This way you're more productive as you have robots working FOR you. If you don't have the capital, then you have to work with your own efforts which, you being merely human, are becoming obsolete.

Wait a minute, why is any different than humans doing the trading? What I see is an ecosystem of algorithms created by humans to make the most profit.

There are few strategies, and lots of bots which creates unstable ecosystems. This is because humans haven't been sufficiently imaginitive to create a diverse ecosystem of bots.

What will probably happen, is that someone will bring sexually reproducing bots to the table whose genes specify strategies to use. These bots will be raised by their parent bots, which will feed them seed capital to begin trading. Inneffetctive bots will lose their money and be unable to reproduce. Profitable bots will pass on their 'genes'. Once in a while the bots' 'biomass' (cash) will be harvested for by humans for consumption.

Once the breeding creates enough diversity, the market ecosystem should stabliize.

Why is not wanting to go to war in Syria considered anti-US? More than half the house of representatives seem to not want to go to war in Syria.

Nobody knows what happened, for sure, or who used the weapons, Assad, or the Rebels, but I actually don't care. It shouldn't involve the US's military.

And because I don't think anyone who wasn't there knows who did what, and even if someone did, because I have no way of vetting their investigations/spin, I have to go with what was my first guess based on who stands to gain. I think likely some Syrian govt. CW depot was captured by the Rebels, or someone in the Syrian military with access to CW, defected to the Rebels, or a Rebel sympathizer in the Syrian military who had not defected officially fired the CW in order to get the US and pals to intervene on the Rebel's behalf.

It only makes sense that the Rebels bombed themselves.

The US shouldn't be anyone's tool.

Also - Syria under Assad is in the US's interest. Having Assad there as a threat gives the US leverage over Saudi Arabia and others in the area who open the oil spigots whenever the US calls because the US is important in protecting themselves from the Assad/Iraq/Iran axis. Assad/Iraq/Iran, aren't the buddies of the US, which means the US isn't liable in a P.R. way for any damage they do, but they could only do real damage with US complicity. This makes them the US's mafia muscle in the area. If the US got rid of Assad, it would be like icing it's own hitman.

Who will pay for protection without the muscle?

And Europe wants a pipeline from SA through Syria so it isn't as dependent on Russian oil. And SA wants the added customers in Europe which BTW would help it thumb it's nose at the US.

How is getting rid of Assad good for the US again?

And the NSA are experts. And the military is a big customer. All you have to do is requrire backdoor-enabled encryption in all military hardware ( it could be secure against anyone without the NSA keys ) or give the most prestigious security certifications to only the stuff with the backdoors, justifying it on some other grounds, and you don't need to send national security letters. People will do it voluntarily - Don't you want to use the security that the experts at the NSA have vetted? And if it weren't secure why would the military be buying it? They're eating their own dogfood, so it can't be bad right?

Also if you're a for profit company you don't REALLY give a damn if the NSA is spying. You're out for money.

And if you are not using software designed for profit, but talking to/through software that is compromised, are you compromised? Has the protocol been negotiated to a level friendly to snooping? You only have control over the software you are running yourself, if you had any.

Leaving messages on the mens room wall spreads info anonymously. I don't think they'll ever crack that without looking at more cracks than they want.

Management that hears it is put in the position of either using their budget to fix it to standard which they should have been following but weren't gaining them nothing, or admitting that THEY screwed up and asking for additional funds from their manager who would be in a similar position.

Mark Twain said something along the lines of 'It's easier to fool people than convince them they've been fooled.'

This is more interesting than what I posted. I wish I'd modded instead.