Of course work was done and paid for. My point is that for the most part service jobs simply swap money back and forth until we need something physical.

  You cut my hair. I paid Bob to fix my plumbing. Bob get's his hair cut by you.

Bob buys some gasoline for his truck. Swoosh.

You take your profit and buy a new flatscreen TV. Swoosh.

The guys in the Middle East and China don't need your services. They have their own. Hence money goes out, not it.

"What, other than lack of education, do you imagine they would require in order to be qualified?"

Intelligence? Talent? By definition, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence. A huge percentage wouldn't even be able to read the books needed, much less understand them, much less make a meaningful contribution -- no matter how good the education.

We've had a lot of bright, educated people working on these problems for decades. They're not solved. As such, it seems fairly obvious, at least to me, that you're going to need a genius or three to provide the insights needed for mankind to make the necessary leaps forward.

Solving those kinds of highly technical, highly complex problems are going to remain in the domain of a very, very, very few. Hence, no jobs for the majority.

As I said earlier, you might do some damage, right up until the US sends down a few fast attacks, destroyers, and some ASW aircraft, who would then proceed to blow your toy into very, very, very small pieces. A sub isn't a man you can hide among a few million others, and the US is very good at anti-submarine warfare, having spent more than a few years chasing Russian subs and boomers.

"If they had any brains they would get their hands on some old WW-II submarines and utterly own the US navy. a WW-II torpedo will take out a US ship easily."

Oh, please. How long did it take us to flatten Iraq armor? To splash their air force?

IF you could find a WWII sub and IF you could get it operational and IF you could man and operate it without sinking yourself in the process, and IF you could arm it... then you might be able to cause some havoc among civilian vessels and freighters.

Right up until the US sends down a few fast attacks, destroyers, and some ASW aircraft, who would then proceed to blow your toy into very, very, very small pieces. A sub isn't a man you can hide among a few million others, and the US is very good at anti-submarine warfare, having spent more than a few years chasing Russian subs and boomers.

"If you try to regulate/restrict something that can be "stolen" easily, then no matter how many laws you pass, it will not stop that specific crime in any way."

Define "easily"? You mean go to your computer and find a torrent and download a file or three until you get a decent copy to put on your media server so you can finally stream it to the big screen? Or go to something like an Apple TV, click "rent", and start watching 30 seconds later?

You have a point in regard to regulation, but Hollywood's best bet is to simply make the stuff available at a price low enough that spending time trawling the net is time wasted.

Make it cheap. Make it simple. Make it convenient. You'll never "kill" it for those who have more time than money (teens). You can, however, effectively kill it for those who value their time and who are willing to spend a few bucks instead of wasting a few hours that they don't have.

"Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject."

1994 calling? Try 1984 calling. Be that as it may, the disk to trash to eject mechanism was a shortcut. The standard way was to click on the disk and select "Eject" from the menu. Or Command-E. The select object, then select action metaphor that was at the core of the entire UI. Not that you should cut some of the first people attempting to design, implement and ship a consumer desktop GUI some slack or anything.

"GUI interfaces .. all existed before Apple added them to devices."

Barely. You should go through the list of extensions and concepts that the Lisa team added to the PARC interface, and that the Macintosh team added to the Lisa interface.

"And swiping to unlock. Pinching to zoom and unzoom. And holding a button down to power off. Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive."

Yep. Slide to unlock, with it's animation, is terribly unintuitive. Almost as bad as the idea of drawing some random symbol on the screen to unlock it. (grin) Scrolling through lists, tapping, pinching? Yeah, they're so unintuitive that my cousin's 4-year old latched onto them after seeing them done ONCE.

Holding down a power button to prevent accidental shutdowns? Yeah, NOBODY does that.

A definition of intuitive is "Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive." Once you've been shown once, pinching outwards to expand (stretch) an image is intuitive. You'd never, for example, pinch IN to expand. That would be counter-intuitive. It simply wouldn't feel right. Gestures become instinctive.

There's precious little that's so "intuitive" that someone can pick it up and do it with with no training or instruction whatsoever. Even using a hammer to drive a nail can require a demonstration by someone who's never seen it. I mean, does it make sense to try to hit the nail with the smallest face? Why not whack it with the broad side to insure hitting it?

It really comes down to how "little" training is needed. If I show you the gesture needed to scroll a list up on an iPhone, do I need to show you how to scroll it down? Do you try swiping side-to-side to see what will happen? That's intuitive.

In any food chain, a species that outstrips it's resources dies off until its numbers once again reach a sustainable level. What makes you think humans are any different?

As to deciding, I'd say that a working, productive member of society has demonstrated their qualifications. Everyone else gets the China solution...

"...it doesn't work for manual labor jobs that have to be done on-site: cleaning toilets, emptying the trash, flipping burgers, etc. You can't outsource those jobs to China."

First, are those minimum-wage jobs really the ones you want to be doing? Second, I think you'd be surprised at just what could be outsourced to India or China or eliminated altogether. Take burger-flipping. There's little to no reason why that the little voice at the other end of the drive-through speaker has to be here in the US. Or, Siri-like, even a person at all. Ever heard of Liquipel? Who says not-so-distant-future toilets will even need cleaning?

"You don't run out of jobs until there is nothing left worth doing. Is commercial-scale Fusion working? Have we colonized Mars yet? Anybody prove whether or not P = NP? How 'bout that cure for cancer?"

As you mention, there's the slight matter of being qualified, and I doubt 99.99% of the workforce is qualified to solve fusion, solve P=NP, or cure cancer. Even with government subsidized education.

And those aren't jobs, those are things that *could* be jobs. Unless and until someone is willing to hire and pay people to solve them, they're just wishful thinking. "Wouldn't curing cancer be nice?" "Yeah, what's on TV?"

"...in the sense that if there is {something} that will do the work cheaper than Americans..."

Something or someone. Today we have guys in a building somewhere in CA flying drones in Afghanistan. Tomorrow we could just as easily have some base-wage-guy in India running a ditch-digging machine in Michigan. Or a doctor in Israel doing your heart surgery in Cleveland.

"...Americans had better find some other work to do..."

Personally, I'm of the opinion that we're rapidly reaching the point where there won't be enough work. Period. Globalization. Automation. Robotics. Telepresence. Millions of people are going to be displaced and rendered obsolete. If not billions.