It's not fair that spouses of H1B workers can't work. It enforces that they be totally dependent on their H1B holding spouses. Completely unfair. If people want to work in they US, their spouses should be independent like everyone else's spouse in the US. Also - people come with spouses. If you don't accept someone's spouse, then you don't accept them.

I don't understand plebs who subscribe to cable.

I remember they'd come out with new channels or switch channel numbers ever few months, so if you had spent the hour it takes to delete all the 100s of Home Shopping / Religious / Sports channels you don't watch you had to add them back to get the full lineup and spend another hour to delete all the Home Shopping / Religious / Sports channels again.

They made the process deliberately cumbersome to prevent you from deleting the Home Shopping Channels. Now I hear they don't even allow deletion.

And they bundle phone and internet. Sheesh! You can pay 15 bucks a month for broadband nowadays. I have an OOma phone which costs me 15 bucks a year in taxes for a landline phone with real cheap international rates and free everything else. I don't know anyone overseas nowadays so ...

I've had Netflix and no cable for years. I have Hulu now, but have been meaning to cancel. These amount to 20 bucks / month. I think I will use the money I was spending on Hulu to do Amazon prime for 100/year. If I order off Amazon.com I get free shipping that way which might pay for half of it.

And I rent movies, and purchase series I am interested in watching off Amazon. Say I spend 18/month on Netflix/Amazon Prime, and have a 75/month TV/Phone/Internet budget, that gives me up to $40.00/month to rent/buy whatever I want off Amazon. I can tell you I don't spend nearly $40.00/month on that - yet I can I watch what I want.

Bill is a joke

Yeah, even though the bill doesn't seem to grant more power to the government than it has already grabbed for itself, having a law around what was illegally done, legitimizes it after the fact, and puts the onus to create new law forbidding the abuses on those who would end them.
and so are the groups that endorse it

Except that the bill at least defines what can and can not be done. The status quo is no definition which means it's free to slide anywhere, by not being prosecuted crimes become norms.

One of the biggest things they should hash out in the courts IMHO is the idea that copying data to a hard drive and not having humans look at it is somehow not unreasonable search. A machine you operate needs to be considered your agent, as machines will only get more intelligent. Indexing is understanding and machines do this. If your agents understand the information gleaned, then the information has been effectively searched. To obtain a copy of information your machine agents have had to handle every bit of the information and save it. Having a copy is the most basic version of understanding information. It equals search. Indexing just compounds the crime.

Yeah, you can tell what the bill does by the title: it's generally the opposite.

It's softer and smaller meaning your car is less likely to crumple. I have no duty to die smashing into a Lincoln to save the idiot driving toward you the wrong way in a Prius or on a motorcycle.

I want MY car that I paid for to protect MY life and the lives of the people in MY car.

I'll drive myself otherwise.

Also Antilock brakes suck. At slow speed they kick in when they shouldn't. There are many times they kick in when control would not be lost and stopping distance would be decreased if they did not kick in. I should be able to override what my car wants.

I hate technology that's mine doing things I don't want despite my wishes.

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.