Labor for the stuff you want is a system that works. It gives the providers of stuff incentive to give you stuff.

It works as long as "providers of stuff" need labor.

The real problem with the "post scarcity" world is that labor is becoming less scarce than resources. Even if every last thing was made by robots, someone has to pay for the stuff the robots make it from.

There was a time when the New York Stock Exchange didn't allow that, either. They caved about a decade ago. Now, both Google and Facebook have two class "president for life" stock issues.

Or better still they clearly need to block themselves in perpetuity (to quote from one of their former "dear leaders", it would deny them the "oxygen of publicity")

The most likely scenario is suicide. It's hard to imagine, but it's happened twice- SilkAir Flight 185 and EgyptAir 990. I don't think there is one case of someone stealing a commercial aircraft, just because there's no way to sell it. It's not a Honda Accord you can sell for cash or strip for parts; it's now the most famous plane in the world and you'll have as much success selling it as you would have selling a stolen Mona Lisa. And the parts have serial numbers.

No other scenario make sense. If the plane was hijacked for a terrorist plot, it should have turned up. Plots like 9/11 rely on the element of surprise, so you need to strike as quickly as possible, instead of giving the authorities an entire week to track you down. Similarly, if the plane and passengers were taken hostage, this would have been announced by now. If your hostage-takers are politically motivated, parading hostages on TV advances their cause; if they're just after money, they need to open negotations. Either way, we should have heard .

It all points to pilot suicide. That raises the question of why the pilot would fly on for hours instead of just nosediving into the ocean, but by definition pilot suicide isn't the act of a rational mind. It suggests not a desire to end one's own suffering but to inflict suffering on others and a complete disregard for human life- in other words, a sociopathic mindset. Eric Harris- the sociopath behind the Columbine killers- comes to mind here. He wanted to end his own life but also to take as many people as possible with him, and get as much attention as possible in it. Some careers attract this kind of person- lawyers, CEOs and surgeons are often sociopaths- and being a pilot may be one of those. You probably find that flying induces anxiety, now imagine that you not only have to worry about the anxiety of flying, but have to actually take responsibility for the safety of the airplane itself and several hundred lives... most normal people wouldn't enjoy that. Sociopaths have no anxiety, and actively enjoy control over and manipulating other people, personality characteristics that would make them a natural for the job.

What might solve the Google problem is to increase the penalties for attaching advertising to someone else's work. People who make content available for downloading but don't put ads on it are doing it as a hobby, and they're not going to become too big, because serving that data costs money. It's the ones who pirate material and add ads that are the problem. They're doing it as a business.

Like YouTube.

I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me.

So well-rounded candidates who enjoy programming but have other hobbies are screwed?

We already knew why people/dogs do that: saliva contains blood clotting agents.

If you don't believe that the government should support research and technology, why do you still use the internet and the web- which were both developed with public funding by DARPA and CERN, respectively? This is the classic hypocrisy of libertarians- when it comes time to pay they claim it's a form of theft, but they have no problem with using all the public services- roads, universities, the internet- that have been paid for with my tax dollars. They're happy to take government services, they just don't want to pay for them. If their house catches on fire, they're going to call 911 just like everyone else.

He should pay people to go around smashing windows so that glaziers will call him a hero too.

Frankly, I think this is useful.

Sure, but that doesn't mean NASA should be doing it. Get some other government body to do it. Or set one up if there isn't anything suitable already existing. Don't use money allocated for space research for something other than space research.

The system already exists; FLYHT Aerospace based out of Calgary sells it for around $100,000. There's been a push for this kind of technology following the loss of Air France 447, when it took almost two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what happened. Warren Buffett's Netjets started installing this technology in 2012 but the larger carriers have been slow to adopt. Presumably after this latest disaster, it will become standard- either the big companies will realize the advantages of being able to track their planes, or governments will make this technology mandatory. It might not have been enough to avert the disaster, but it would have spared a week (or however long it ultimately takes) to find the plane and figure out what happened.

So first, a potential argument against the suicide scenario is that it would be more rational to simply fly the plane straight down instead of flying on for 7 hours. Of course, if we are talking about a suicidal pilot, then we're talking about someone sadistic and deranged enough to kill 238 people. This is, by definition, not someone who is thinking in terms of what is the most rational response to a given situation, but a deeply fucked up individual. If they're sadistic enough to kill over 200 people and inflict untold suffering on their loved ones, maybe they're also sadistic enough to torment them for seven hours first. We're not talking about a simple suicide here, we're talking about a murder-suicide like Columbine or a suicide bomber.

Second, if someone wanted to steal a 777 for a terrorist attack, then why haven't we seen the attack? If there's a terrorist plot like during 9/11, then it requires the element of surprise. The more time passes, the more time there is for people to unravel the plot and send in the Special Forces to take out the plotters.

Third, if it's piracy, why haven't we seen the ransom? If you're a Somali pirate, then once you've got the ship safely in the harbor in Somalia, you send a message to the owners of the ship that you're open for negotiation. Also, if you want to do the piracy thing, you have to find somewhere sufficiently lawless that they won't arrest you when you land. Even a place like Kazakhstan isn't lawless enough; you don't just need a repressive dictatorship, you need a failed state level of anarchy, somewhere like Somalia or the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And as for selling the plane on the black market, you might be able to pinch and sell a few parts... but this is the most famous airplane in the world right now. there's no way in hell you could sell so much as a rivet if it had the serial number on it.

Pilot suicide is, unfortunately, the simplest explanation that fits the facts. We've seen it before and it would fit what happened here. For the sakes of the crew and families, I desperately hope that's wrong, but it's been more than a week- if these people were alive, we'd probably have heard by now.

It's not unreasonable to say that they should be able to track the plane using satellite. There are a lot of media reports to the effect that it's not quite as easy as Find My iPhone but the technology is there. In fact it should be far easier to locate a plane than an iPhone, because unlike an iPhone, a 777 is a very large piece of equipment with plenty of power, so it's trivial to install satellite communications. So sure, it's true ACARS won't do it, but that's because ACARS is an obsolete system.

For $150 and a $100 annual fee you can get a portable satellite beacon that broadcasts the position of your trek or your kayak trip every 5 minutes. It's bullshit to argue that it's difficult or expensive to do for an aircraft what you do for your kayak trip, and ridiculous that this isn't already required for every large commercial aircraft. And in fact there's a company- FLYHT Aerospace- that already delivers a system that does real-time black-box reporting via satellite networks. It costs around $100,000 to install during routine heavy maintenance, and it will automatically relay data on position, altitude, heading, fuel use, etc. every few minutes.

If they had had this technology installed, not only would they know what happened to the plane, they would have known within minutes that the plane had changed course. They could have radioed the pilot, and if he didn't respond they could have scrambled interceptors, and if it still crashed, they could have put rescue helicopters in position to respond. Not having real-time reporting in place cost lives.

(Disclaimer- I like to play the stock market, so I took a sizeable position in FLYHT).

Agreed. If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then it's also a homicide of over 200 people. That's no better- in fact, far worse- than a suicide bomber who kills dozens of unarmed men, women and children by blowing up an explosive vest in a crowded market.

BULLSHIT. I don't care how much fucking pain you're in. You want to end your own life? Fine, go right ahead. I believe everyone has the right, and God knows I understand the appeal. I've been there. It's not so much the pain, which is bearable, as the lack of joy or any pleasure in your work, your friends, or your family, and the prospect that it will never end. In that situation, suicide becomes a rational decision.

But even when things were at their darkest, I never lost sight of one fact: the fact that killing myself was in the end a purely selfish act, and one that would cause a tremendous amount of pain and suffering and trauma. For my friends and my family when they found out, for the people who would find my body hanging by a rope, for the people who would have to go through my things and figure out what to do with them... it was the quickest and easiest way to relieve the suffering, but I never thought for a moment that there would be anything remotely noble about going through with it.

But if killing yourself is selfish, how much more selfish is it to kill 233 other people- the people who put themselves in your care, in your trust? That's not selfish, that's outright malicious. There is something deeply fucked up, purely malicious, and wholly evil about someone who, in the process of killing themselves, takes other people with them. It's one thing if your life is so fucked up you just want out. But just because you're miserable, what the hell gives you the right to deny other people their happiness? The poor bastards from Iran who just wanted to have opportunities abroad that they didn't have at home, and used those stolen passports... if this was a pilot suicide, no matter how much pain he's in, what gives him the right to deny them their dreams, to take them from their friends and family? If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then I hope there's a Hell, and I hope it's got all nine levels like in Dante, because this guy should straight to the lowest fucking level, the level for people who commit treachery, and there's no amount of suffering that would be too much for a crime like that.