Indeed. I saw a post a while back about "basic salary". Essentially everyone gets paid enough by whoever to afford a living space and food. Those who are content to sit on their ass, do so. Those who aren't come up with awesome stuff at their own pace. This is obviously some form of socialism in the present day because someone has to pay for the couch potatoes. But...

What happens when everything is completely automated? Like food production, house building, raw material extraction, robot maintenance, pop single recording and michael bay movies? Humans are the only entities that care about salaries and if there are no humans in your conglomerate to pay I see two options. You can have an elite circle jerk where a couple CEOs control all the wealth in the world and just transfer it among each other while suppressing the peasants...or...provide all the standard stuff at cost (free) and allow the non slugs to come in and provide some kind of value addition for other non slugs. You're not taking anything from the go getters so the randian producers/leeches model doesn't apply.

I doubt I'll live long enough to see how it all shakes out but history shows that revolution is the most common result of keeping the peasants down (in this case, the super rich circle jerk)

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"

- Some historical figure who's name I forgot

Sounds about right. Regardless, some quick consoling thoughts:

"Better late than never"

"A win is a win"

Wow, whoda thought poor spelling would move to the top of that list?

First of all, human activity hasn't changed the global temp by 10 degrees (C or F). But if we got rid of ALL the CO2 that would indeed be a bad thing. We shouldn't do that. Ideally we would just get rid of the CO2 that the industrial age introduced and allow nature to take its course. The global temp may well drop 10 degrees but it would do so over 100,000 years or so like it always has. A blink of the eye to the earth but thats 20x the age of modern society. We could adapt in that time span. Case in point: 5000 years ago humans discovered how to make a notch in clay. Today we have a problem of placing too much crap in ORBIT. We can surely figure out how to move a city in that timespan. However, since we don't like change and we're not going to get rid of the CO2 any time soon, how in the hell is society going to deal with a 1-2 degree rise in temps in less than a century?

But thats not even the best argument. We should be spending tons of money on renewable energy research because it just makes fucking sense! Cheap max theoretical efficiency solar panels and wind farms could provide all the power you need right where you live! No need to lose 1/3 of the energy in transmission lines, or deal with middle east politics, or west Virginia black lung. A $100 billion one time fee and were good to go! The US could cover it by ordering a few less joint strike fighters and reducing healthcare costs by a few %. I'm convinced we can do it...but probably won't. /rant

Correct! CFC's were a huge concern and the global community realized this, did something about it and now they are no longer a concern. Keyword in your sentence: WAS.

SO2 and CO2 can BOTH be bad at the same time. Think Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan in their heydays. Britney's shaved head may have diverted attention from a paparazzi crotch shot but regardless, they both ended up in rehab/jail.

Sarcasm aside, I honestly hope you're right about this one too because that would mean that society either resolved global warming or it wasn't as bad as is currently predicted and society has advanced to the point where some new awesome shit is happening with unintended consequences like interstellar travel radiation causes spontaneous superpowers creating a societal rift. For factual content, your post may deserve the mod point but I'm still going to say it was misleading.

I hear you, friend. CO2 isn't even the end of dirty's improper use. There are thousands of girls all over the internet that are also called "dirty", even "very dirty". But upon close inspection, most of them don't have any dirt on them at all! And you can seriously inspect everything. Whats wrong with our society?!

The 1980's called, they want their family friendly pop culture zingers back.

I do if that guy is named Elon Musk. From what I know he is a bizarre type of billionaire. Rather than just increase Q3's profit forecast he actually seems to want to advance the human race through true technical progress. If there was some public transit project underway it wouldn't surprise me at all to see him throw a couple bucks at it. But there isn't. There is however, a project underway to improve the road he is driving on right now and hes one of the few people Ive ever heard of to voluntarily give money to potentially improve his life even so it might possibly improve all of his neighbors lives as well.

Thats all well and good for your examples because in each case, the transaction occurred at the merchant's location. What's the point of sale for amazon.com or a bid on ebay? Is it where you enter your credit card on your PC in your home state? The home of the guy you're buying from? The warehouse where its shipped from? Or the server that handles the transaction? It seems to me your examples break down when you apply them to online sales.

One nitpick: doesn't a regime need to be stable before it can be destabilized?

If I read GP's post correctly I believe he actually said

Hope that clears it up. Regarding your second wild conjecture...

Thermonuclear weapons landing on NK cities would indeed qualify as a thermonuclear war on the korean peninsula. I'll grant you that the US has a ton of baggage but I don't get how you can keep being so apologetic to the NK regime. Since you asked (ha I kill me), my take on the situation is that we got a 30 year old kid trying to out-blowhard all of the blowhards at the top of NK's military so no one tries to make a power play on him. Thats why the usual saber rattling (designed to get aid money for their hopelessly decrepit country) started to spiral out of control. Add in the sanctions preventing luxury goods being shipped to his palaces and he is backed in a corner and has no choice but to get even crazier.

Couple quick thoughts:
- Advanced carbon fiber manufacturing making wind power very close to an honest to goodness viable power source (I'm talking free market style...give it a few more years)
- Better batteries that enable a normal looking and driving car to go over 200 miles on a 1 hour charge
- Process improvements making 24" LCD screens viable for less than $200
- The whole semiconductor industry making tech so freaking cheap
- Probable observation of the Higgs Boson
- Possible observation of dark matter
- advanced stock trading algorithms allowing 1000 point market jumps and drops within milliseconds (I kid, I kid)

Yes, just like your laptop from 15 years ago that had a cable plugged into the wall. But removing that cable took the collective effort of a $trillion (probably) industry. Could your laptop scale one of its 9 different radios (2G/3G/4G/Bluetooth/Wifi/near field/AM/FM/GPS) up to 64-QAM on the fly based on geography while maintaining a connection for you to watch youtube in your car? How bout doing it for 6-7 hours without being plugged into the wall with a weight measured in grams? I mean, high speed bluetooth starts a packet using the bluetooth protocol and then mid-packet switches to wifi protocol to get higher throughput. That's pretty amazing to me because I've had to deal with stuff like protocol stacks.

The fact that all this crazy innovation works so seamlessly that people never need to care what happens behind the scenes is probably the most impressive demonstration of rapid progress I can think of. But just in case, check out all the progress made mapping genomes, robotics, space missions, etc. Anytime you want to be amazed, just take a quick peek below the surface of anything that goes on in your daily life.

I haven't read that book but in most nuclear supervillian stories I've read they generally ignore the logistics side of things. Sure there is a lot of shady money floating around but obtaining, maintaining and deploying a small advanced nuclear device would require resources of one of the world's top 10 GDP's. Think of how many people you'd have to hire/bribe/threaten/kill to get your plan to work. A big part of most of these plans is that they pop up out of nowhere. With all the world resources devoted to spying, not a single one of your henchmen will slip up? And if you own a car company -- because manufacturers import the cars, not dealerships -- you're already at the top of a $billion empire and you deal with hundreds of people a week. You're going to hide your scheme to destroy the world from all the other sharks trying to climb the ladder? Thats why Austin Powers was so funny (the first time). A supervillian holds up the world for $1million when his legitimate business pulled in $3billion last quarter. It just doesn't happen. The real supervillians run 3rd world countries and are too busy terrorizing their own people. (or in NK's case, too ridiculous to pull it off). 9/11 is the only major incident that works as a counter argument but the complacency that allowed it to happen no longer exists. If they tried using nukes they'd have been caught long before the planes took off.