Its going to be like on the Star Trek episode "Bread and Circuses": a man adjusting dials labelled "Boos", "Cheers" and other crowd noises. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... starting around 0:35

And then, a cow realises that its entire world is an illusion... The Matrix Has Moo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

xkcd: Academia vs. Business

The pendulum will have swung back from neoliberal "the market rules" to social democratic "big safety net". People will look back on our time in something like the same way that we look back on Victorian factory owners who got rich by exploiting child labour.

This is a change in degree, not kind; every developed economy is somewhat social democratic. Even the USA has minimum wage, social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps etc. The debate is not whether these things are necessary, rather it is a question of how much to spend and how best to direct them.

The decades since 1980 have seen a broad swing to a neoliberal consensus in which these things are to be reduced in order to reduce government spending, which in turn allows for increased economic activity in making things, which is supposed to make everyone richer. However we are now seeing that the last bit doesn't work very well, leading to pressure to do something about it.

This political pressure currently shows up as support for populist candidates who promise to solve the problems caused by "them", for various values of "them" (e.g. the feckless poor, the liberal elite, the media, foreigners, Eurocrats, drug dealers, jews, blacks, whites, muslims, gays, the list is endless). However amongst all the competing targets the big persistent one is of huge multinational companies and their billionaire bosses who pay little or no tax quite legally while telling the rest of us to tighten our belts.

The big problem for such "tax and spend" policies is simply that taxing the very wealthy is currently not possible: if you put up your tax rates the profits and income you were going to tax somehow evaporate and emerge in another jurisdiction with lower tax rates.

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I see this leading to a new consensus in which tax havens everywhere (including the USA) come under increasing pressure to share information about beneficial ownership and money flows, allowing governments to effectively tax the very wealthy and spend the money on social safety nets, UBI and health care.

I've seen a few 3D movies. Avatar was fantastic, but everything else has been a big disappointment. Too often the producer gives you a close-up of something or someone and the 3D puts it somewhere in front of the screen, but then the borders of the screen cut the thing off despite being "behind" the thing they are blocking. It totally destroys the 3D illusion.

If 3D movies are ever to become important then directors are going to have to avoid close-ups.

Bear in mind that these are small islands off the north coast of Scotland. They have a dialect word "yarfast" meaning "tied down so it won't get blown away". https://books.google.com/books...

When I was in my mid teens (say around 1980) I would daydream about one day being able to afford a subscription to an electronically searchable Encyclopaedia Britannica, and maybe the electronic versions of some scientific journals too. Of course I would also need to buy a desktop computer with the graphics to display useful pictures, which would be expensive, and there would be a second phone line and a modem too. When I was at Uni a few years later there were all sorts of competing LAN standards. The idea that you could walk into a building, plug in your luggable computer and start work was a pipe dream. The idea that you might not even have to plug it in... I also did some back-of-the-envelope maths which suggested that you ought to be able to provide enough bandwidth for low grade video via a cellular network if you could afford a cell station at roughly street level in busy places and every few streets in residential areas. But that was obviously never going to be a feasible business proposition.

"First, there was the problem of Rama's light curve. It didn't have one." From "Rendevous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Have you seen the amount of damage an unskilled plumber can do? And water plumbing merges with gas pluimbing, where lack of skill can be extremely dangerous.

Yes, by all means, let us create a breed of humans that suffer from premature alzheimers so that we can study the disease more effectively.

> If they come down with the flu, they won't be able to leave until they've tested negative for the virus for two days. So what if they decide to leave? Is this merely a civil breach of contract, or is it an indenture? Will they be bought back in chains by men in hazmat suits?

The science fiction book "Earth" by David Brin predicted exactly this back in 1990. Brin imagined a clip-on device that would interpret subvocalised words by measuring muscle movements in the chin and throat, exactly like this. He called it the "subvocal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Oh give me a drone, That phones home on its own, And uploads all that I've done, And when it has phoned, Little drone of my own, Its makers will see all my fun.

But no doubt he'll take the plea bargain and spend a mere 1% of that in a low security prison, just like Aaron was supposed to.

In "Distraction" the US government (whats left of it) has software to do this, and it works. But it has been repurposed. Now the idea is to find the borderline crazy guys and spam them with messages saying that is a drug dealing paedophile commie terrorist who needs to be shot. So now has to cope with a steady stream of crazy shooters. Even if survives, they will be too busy dodging the crazies to cause any more trouble.