It's because they can sense electromagnetic fields, which all electronics give off. Of course, the solution for dealing with these new ants is simple, but counterintuitive -- spray everything with this 'alarm' pheremone. If ants navigate by scent trail, and that's how they rebuild their nests, and it's too challenging to remove the scent trails... then you are left with only one option:

Blind the little bastards by coating everything in it. It's my understanding that, without those trails, they'll be helpless to organize to find food, each other, or even the way home. Everything depends on those trails... so if you overload their sense organs and blind them, they'll perish. After they're dead, the pheremones sprayed will slowly dissipate, but importantly... the trails they've laid down will dissipate faster, so the area is then chemically neutral again.

It is, quite literally, chemical warfare. (-_-)

I tried that, but apparently they're better at it than I am... my proposal got rejected for not supporting the datamatrix foo buffer 2.0 cloud feature-rich zero-management extranet interface. The work order was to get a replacement power cord... the cleaning people let a vaccum cleaner chew on the last one...

Would you prefer a breakout every 500 years, 100 years, 10 years? Yearly? I can point to every dominant society and show that there was a small "elite" class and a large "working class", at just about every sample point. Yes, there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's how it plays out.

And the description "worker-slaves" wasn't meant to say they were a bona fide slave labor class, but to point out that they work hard for limited benefit to themselves, but a large benefit to the elite classes. If the resources were not being diverted so that a small number of affluent individuals were not taking the lion's share of the resources, then people would need to work a lot less to achieve similar increases in their own relative standard of living.

This equation doesn't change whether you're in the Bronze Age, or the Internet Age. The technology may be better. Your health may even be better. But you are still reaping only a fraction of the available benefits and resources compared to the amount of work, and when you die and are buried, we can examine your body and based solely on that examination, determine whether you were an elite, or a worker, in your own time.

The fact that every now and then a slave is freed or achieves wealth is not a validation of slavery, nor is it evidence of the magnanimity of the slave owner. It is evil, through and through. To subjugate another entirely to your own will is never moral, never ethical, it is a fundamental debasement of that person's humanity.

Look, if you want to nitpick over history I can get right down in the mud and examine the influence of post-summerian pottery on Chinese adoption of animal husbandry, but it's pointless. I'm trying to make a point quickly, and concisely, not write a fucking thesis about the subject matter. That isn't "glossing over", it's "summarizing", and it's something anyone who's ever wanted to scream "Get to the point!" at another person can immediately understand the value of.

"So guys, our, umm, magic glowing rectangles have been, uhh, a bit less magical this week. Apparently an, umm... black box that communicates using, uhh... a special language... er, well, stopped speaking with another black box that's just like it, except not ours. So we, uhh, asked our engineers to look into that, and yeeeeah... they're ah, still doing that now. It's been about four days, and uhh, they're not exactly sure where the problem is, so if we could, you know..."

(Engineer bursts into the room) "It was the router you bleeping idiots! If you'd just told us your network was down we'd have fixed it in TWO MINUTES, but your work order was blabbering on about magical boxes and glowing rectangles and we thought you were all drugged or somesuch and called 911 instead. It was only after someone in the NOC got back from their smoke break they saw the line was dead and dispatched a tech."

(sounds of approaching sirens)

"You deserve this," says the network engineer, storming off.

If there was an alternative to Google that wasn't total crap, I'd be using it. As it is, they still try to connect searches you make to a real identity by buying personal data from the major ISPs to tie your name to an IP address, etc. I've found myself having to only access it from Tor or other proxy networks to keep its privacy-invading "features" out of my web experience. And it seems like every month they roll out a new way of trying to screw with that, from "your computer may be sending automated queries" garbage to providing obviously-bogus search results if embedded javascript detects a SOCKS proxy.

There is no more "do no evil" in Google... it has become the very definition of evil.

Considering how fast new things come (and go) in this field, anyone with more than five years of industry experience can claim to be "old". Anyway... Can I just say -- you need to update your wardrobe if you have 24 year old socks. My car isn't even that old, and it's falling apart; If I kept socks for that long, they'd be like... sock molecules, held together only by determination and a fierce desire to not be trendy.

Hmm... Let's see.
5000 BC: Iraq, Samarra. About the only thing we know is they did pottery. Beyond this point, there aren't any reliable records.
4000 BC: Mesopotamia. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
3000 BC: Mesopotamia. The Sumerian hegemony. A few wealth people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 BC: Egypt. The height of the Old Kingdom. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 BC: China, Zhou Dynasty. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
0 AD: Roman Empire. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.

Have I made my point yet?

That's why you legislate it at the state or federal level, just as every other major safety innovation has had to, historically.

Airbags: "They cost too much! Cars will be too expensive."
Seatbelts: "Consumers find them too restrictive!"
Third brake light: "It increases cost! And why would you need 3?"
Anti-lock brakes: "The maintenance costs will be extraordinary!"
Replacing metal 'guard rails' with concrete...
Repairing structurally deficient bridges... ...

You get the idea. The only way to get anything new adopted is either to have a lot of people die in a short period of time, preferably affluent people (see also: Titanic), to tax it, or to have a ground-swell of public support for it. Simply arguing for it on the basis that it'll save lives is a pointless endeavor.

It could save a hundred thousand lives a year, and nobody would give a fuck. See also: Drunk driving. Inattentive driving, etc. Nobody wants to deal with those problems, so people go right on dying... but at predictable rates. So there you have it.

Dude, all you've done is pulled a bunch of numbers out of your ass, and then constructed an argument on it. Now I appreciate that maybe Fox News has had a bad impact on your ability to construct a proper argument, but rather than address the specific points, I'll just throw out a couple key principles that are well-established and then hit the conclusion.

First, if you increase labor, and demand remains constant, the price will drop. This is the law of supply and demand. All of your quoting of numbers and beating of chest tries to cover up the fact that more workers means lower wages, all other things being equal. It's an escapable economic truth.

As to the rest of your rant, it's all weasel words, ad homid attacks, and a lot of screaming "It can't be true because it can't be true because..." circular logic.

Here's some global data regarding wages. I'm not going to make it too easy for you by linking in the exact table you need to look at... but if you want to educate yourself instead of screaming profanities... I'd start there.

Dude, you are the reason why tenure is a bad thing. If anyone suggested something as hopelessly stupid as what you just did in my college, I'd not just boot your ass, I'd build a special rocket to fire you into the Sun to rid the planet of your stupidity.

Every 10 years, some pundit comes along and says technology will have us all living the good life and little robots and shit will do all the work for us. But the truth is the same today as it has been throughout human history: It's cheaper to enslave other people to achieve that "good life" than it is to build the technology to elevate us all. And humanity, on the whole, has steadfastly chosen short term gain for some over long-term prosperity all. Hell, this ball of spinning rock you're on is actually starting to cook itself (and us) because of this fact of humanity.

The entire notion ranks right up there with believing that a better understanding of the problem will necessarily lead to better decisions. Lulz. You can lead a horse to water...

Instagram: A photo sharing site. These have been around since, I don't know, the beginning of the internet?

GoPro: We took a camera... and duct taped it to you! Wow. Innovative.

iPhone / iPad: Can't comment on it on this website. Too many religious connotations, not enough facts.

Square: omg! A way to insecurely store your personal banking data on your phone.

None of these things will be remembered in 20 years as significantly advancing the state of the art.

Not in production, just became profitable after heavy government subidizing, follows on the heels of NASA who did all the heavy lifting, and things in the sky that are trying to kill us. Yeah... USA! USA! USA!

Gimme a break, man. Look at the Large Hadron Collider -- that could have been us, but we slashed the funding. A Nobel Prize? What's that compared to sleezy marketing and questionable accounting practices? Not much, that's what.

When I say new tech, I don't mean new business. America is great at cranking out variations on the same theme -- turn on the TV sometime. It's all just rehashes. And our technology sector is quickly becoming the same thing. It's all formulaic. There is no innovation, no risk taking, no entrepreneurship.

And that's my point. Every last example you've thrown up has been done before. Every. Last. One. Google car? DARPA robotics. SpaceX? NASA. Tesla? Tesla! And drones... dude, R/C airplanes aren't exactly cutting edge. We can mass produce them, yes, but it's not revolutionary... it's just taking what we already had and repurposing it.

They're nice pieces of kit, but they are not revolutionary, ground-breaking, paradigm-breaking things. We haven't had any of that in a good fifteen years now. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world... China's building dams that it takes all afternoon to walk across, entire cities and railway projects are springing up almost overnight, etc. In Europe, we've got the LHC churning out new physics.

Just about everywhere else you care to look besides the United States is showing signs of innovative new ways of doing things. The only thing we're good at... is business.

Yes, but we don't dissect our children to figure out how to better parent them.

I can't say I speak for everyone, but I know I speak for the most professional amongst us when I say: Thank you. I'll never work for you, but we need more managers like you in the field. People who are willing to roll their sleeves up and get involved. So again, thanks.

We now return to our regularly scheduled flame-fest, already in progress...

We've long established that the source of the human "soul" is in the brain. Those interconnections give rise to consciousness and self-awareness -- and sentience. If you build something that precisely models the brain, you will be creating sentience. I have to question how we can create a sentient creature simply to experiment upon it and still claim to have a shred of humanity to us.

I know that this is not as dazzling and interesting as building the device to geeks like us, but we cannot simply ignore the ethical consequences of our actions. All vocations, all manner of human endeavor, must move forward with an eye towards a respect for life. This may not be human life we're creating, or even organic life, but it is no less deserving.

Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?