What about firm which communicate using VPN ? No entities are in Australia , just maybe a worker or two communicating with a german firm for example.

I should have made clear I was speaking of the USA and the forerunner inputs to the USA. My apologies.

I'd be fascinated to hear about a country that doesn't work this way, though. Can you elaborate?

You demonstrate complete ignorance of what a true state of desperation is. Any society that allows its citizens to become desperate has abandoned any chance at a peaceful existence, regardless of the delicious flavor of its rhetoric. Keep an eye on the constantly growing convicted felon class for profound examples.

If you have real solutions I'd like to hear them.

The keys are twofold: First, don't borrow money. Ever. Not from the bank, not with a credit card, not for a house and not for a vehicle. Buy the very least expensive thing that will do the job you *require*, and no more. If you find opportunity to do so, loan money out at interest and see to it you get paid. If you can, continue to live with your parents, otherwise, share expenses as much as possible, and be a *great* person to room with, temperment-wise. Second, disengage from racing with the Joneses. Learn to cook and be efficient in your use of materials and ingredients. Learn about reuse. Garage sales, etc. You don't need to drink, to party, to have cable or satellite or streaming or CDs or DVDs or Blurays, to smoke, new clothes, jewelry, to go out to eat, to have books (libraries are still around, and there's the net), to have a spouse or to have children. Exercise. Take those two ideas and exist in their embrace for a decade or two, and you *wlll* have money unless your health significantly fails. In that case, at least in this society, you're screwed.

Then invest your money in the performance of the upper tier, and it will grow. Don't spend your capital. That's it, in a nutshell. Either you do it that way, or you find a job- or trustfund-based way to accrue money faster than you can spend it -- but most people have no access to that kind of income, and the lottery, well, participation in the lottery is simply an indicator you can't do math.

Even if every last thing was made by robots, someone has to pay for the stuff the robots make it from.

No. Doesn't follow. Effectively infinite resources await us nearby in space. Robots can mine and refine and manufacture whatever we need indefinitely from those resources. We're not there yet, but it is certainly an attainable goal from where we stand right now.

Soon, the only "skilled job" left that robots won't easily be able to replace (or will they?) will be as a prostitute.

I can pretty much guarantee you this will be one of the areas where robots could do an excellent job, far better than any human could. As to whether they will, that remains to be seen, but I must point out that the sex industry is already trying the idea on for size with RealDolls and so forth.

Let's say that we get to excellent automatons and high quality body manufacturing. Not even AI. Given that, we can have a robot sex worker that can focus on you, and only you, and really, really mean it. It can do it for an hour and go on to someone else, or it can do it for your entire lifespan without ever straying -- whatever you like, or can afford. It doesn't care about your other relationships and will treat you as #1 no matter how you stray or experiment. It won't be jealous unless you want it to, and it will participate if that's what you want. It can remain disease-free and safe. It's not going to have a period, be distracted, moody, greedy, angry, or have any kind of a problem if you get a phone call. It won't demand that you recognize its power, or fill your ear with talk of equality or fairness. It will have a repertoire of skills that will dwarf any human's. It isn't going to inevitably age or get ugly, although it could definitely change in any way you want it to -- hair, skin, body type, sex organs, lips, eyes, etc. such that it could be someone (thing) different every day of your life, and it's going to enthusiastically go along with your wildest kinks, only difference being that it will be better at them than you are, all to your benefit. It won't require gifts, child support, get pregnant, or stray. It won't get tired of you, it won't be duplicitous, it won't ever call a lawyer or a friend and violate your trust, it won't require a pre-nup, nag you about marriage, or threaten you with multi thousand dollar wedding dresses and even more expensive weddings. There will be no in-laws, and you will never come home to find a pocket dog with a face like satan, a yip pitched such that it could shatter glass, and a body like a wharf rat on your couch, complete with a brand new puddle of urine on your oriental rug.

The question most here aren't asking is, what does society look like when there simply aren't jobs to do? It doesn't have to be a bad thing. The narrative that "one must work to have dignity and/or happiness" is nonsense pushed into the psyche of the ignorant from above. The no-work situation is coming, no doubt about it: what it will look ilke will depend entirely on what the population can be made to put up with.

Most of the poor get richer slowly as technology raises their standard of living. Those controlling the system get richer much faster as they reap the same benefits, along with the majority of the usable output of the poor. Some kind of a despised, often disenfranchised class is maintained to focus the anger of the population away from those controlling the system. Almost everyone advances; the gap grows ever larger. It has always been this way; likely it will always be so.

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.

Ah this "no-value-added middleman" is the guy who created the show, researched it, wrote it, his wife is one of the main characters and he acts in it as well. He is by no stretch a "middleman". I am not saying I agree with him - haven't read the article yet even - but he definitely on the creator side of things.

I always find it interesting how Germany is pointed at as an example of eugenics when the US started it several decades prior to Germany. In fact, it was the US programs which inspired Germany.

There were even suggestions in the early 1900's, in the US, to use gas chambers to weed out the undesirables.

But don't let reality get in the way. It was those evil Nazis that started it.

I recently played a few hours of Mario Kart 64 (yep, dusted of the old N64) on a couch with some friends and by the end of it, my lower back was killing me. I never get this when I spend 4 hours playing Civ IV.

Absolutely. If you look at the posture of someone playing a console game, you will see an arched back, pressure on the lumbar, neck pulled back, often feet not flat on the floor.

As you can see from this photo of me playing WoW, PC gaming provides a much more healthy posture:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xAf6...

So where do proper adult gamers sit when they spend quality time playing a game with their own children or with the children they're babysitting?

Playing on a console with a child who is your own or entrusted to your care is borderline child abuse.

My daughter preferred singing songs, hearing me read a book or playing one of the many musical instruments in the house. Or, as she got older, playing with her microscope set or walking through the woods or older still, practicing martial arts and riding her skateboard.

At some point, she liked games, but preferred playing on her PC to consoles, because consoles are for nincompoops. She is now working on a PhD in Mathematics and can kick your ass. At Battlefield 4 or a with a 2-meter staff. Or the puzzle of your choice.

I don't like using the term, "master race", and I don't like to say that it was the choice of PC over consoles that made her grow so straight and true, but the result speaks for itself.

In yet other news ... here's an idea! If you are concerned about propaganda causing your citizens to become "radicalized", why not take the most effective steps possible to prevent that? Create the most sane, free, reasonably run society in which civil rights are sacrosanct, all of the laws are sensible, and all of the laws are equally enforced.

You'll find that far fewer of the citizens would ever want to do anything to oppose that. It's more effective than playing whack-a-mole with an ever-growing list of terrorists.

Bitcoin is not subject to, artificially limited by, nor of value due to copyright. You are not stealing bitcoin, you are stealing the value that bitcoin represents. That value is not some abstract hypothetical potential profit loss but a fairly easy (within a reasonable margin for exchange variation) to quantify amount of spending power in any currency in the world.

If I steal your credit card number (and bitcoin is ultimately nothing more than a secret number that allows you to unlock a persons money and spend it) and then buy something with it I've stolen pretty much the same thing. A number that allows me buy goods using a system that operates entirely on streams of bits.

If I hack your bank account and transfer the money out, that money also is a stream of bits. The same of your paypal account.

These things are unique and set up in such a way that the value, just like an individual tangible CD, can only be possessed by one person.

Software does not actually belong to the guy who holds a copyright in the case of copyright violation the software actually belongs to the guy sharing it and violating the copyright. You can steal a copyright, you can't steal the software. If you copy the software, you both now have copies and nothing is lost from the source. Software that is shared becomes no less functional no matter how much it is shared, software can be possessed by every person and they will all have the same thing with the same intrinsic value.