Stop being silly. If the machines weren't a net force-multiplyer for labor, they wouldn't be used in the first place. The impact hasn't really been felt yet because humans have moved into service jobs; once those start being automated more extensively you'll realize how stupid this statement is.

My recollection is that it only came into use as something that humans used with the execrable Deep Space Nine.

Hi! Your opinions are wrong, and you should feel bad. TOS mentioned money and wages in the context of humans a few times, it was only in TNG that the whole "we're beyond money and serious interpersonal conflict" thing got pushed by Roddenberry (whose death during the early years of TNG, incidentally, allowed it to become a better show, since he had become overly dedicated to Mary-Sueing the humans).

TNG may have been my favorite of the series, but DS9 was arguably a better show overall, and hardly an execrable cash-in. You can reserve that appellation for Voyager/Enterprise if you wish. DS9 was still an idealistic series (if you don't believe me, watch it in concert with the new Battlestar Galactica), it was just more realistic about what allowed that idealism to exist. Given that the Federation was explicitly anti-genetic engineering and it's not really set that far in the future, the general "niceness" of the humans pretty much had to be environmental in nature. DS9 was set at the fringes of that environment, both geographically and situationally, where its elements couldn't always be counted on, which made it a more interesting show in some ways than the others.

Citation needed. To my knowledge, the DoD is nowhere near being willing to field anything carrying weapons that isn't directly human-controlled. Research is one thing, active implementation is different.

Thomas Paine was in favor of a form of Guaranteed Basic Income with similar reasoning.

It depends what you mean by superior controls. PC's have superior pointing controls, but WASD is inferior when it comes to movement. They're better for FPSs because aiming is more important than movement. I wouldn't want to play Mario Galaxy with a mouse/keyboard though.

It wasn't deregulation, it was being forced by government to give loans to people who had no business taking loans.

Stop repeating this simplistic meme. If you can't be bothered to not be disingenuous/uninformed, then just shut the hell up.

Since not all countries can be wealthy

Why not, theoretically?

While it is an understandable mistake the fact that the author does not know the correct spelling suggests that either does not normally write papers or that he does not normally write papers about photons i.e. he is out of his area of expertise.

Maybe he just doesn't normally write papers in English?

It's hardly my theory that objects radiate more as their temperature increases, I supposed the Stefan-Boltzmann law, or a derivation thereof, is what you're looking for. You can observe experimental proof with a damn lightbulb. And you're not allowed to bitch about the "blackbody" formalization; greenhouse and other effects change the equilibrium temperature, not the underlying principle. For the record, I believe Earth actually radiates slightly more energy than it takes in due to geothermal output.

Re: The biosphere- I was simply making the point that not all of the sun's energy goes into raising the Earth's temperature or gets re-emitted, some gets stored in chemical bonds. That's it.

The reason I call you an idiot is because you're being kind of an idiot. Even I know that no scientist thinks the Earth is going to get infinitely hot, they're worried changes to the atmosphere are going to increase the equilibrium temperature, on a scale that may be minor by interstellar and even planetary history standards but disastrous for the current biosphere. You'd rather just assume that everyone you disagree with politically is incapable of understanding basic physics.

It's like having an abortion because you flail and wail that you were raped or whatever.

Christ, what an asshole.

My thesis is that the net energy of the earth is and will continue to increase over time, so long as it is in the current orbit around Sol and that Sol doesn't run out of fuel.

Which is why I say you're an idiot, since as far as I can tell you pulled this thesis out of your ass without realizing the Earth, or any orbiting body really, has an equilibrium temperature where the radiated energy equals the incoming, and doesn't simply get hotter forever. You also seem to be under the impression that every climate scientist on the planet forgot the existence of the goddamned sun in their modeling, which only you managed to remember.

Energy gets stored in chemical bonds, I'm not sure what's controversial about the statement. The biosphere didn't exist in the past. It may be a miniscule amount in the Earth's total energy budget, but it's still a form of radiative energy capture.

Believe it or not I don't actually have much of an opinion on AGW, as it's a complex subject I haven't looked into extensively, and I know better than to rely on mainstream science reporting for relaying scientific knowledge. It's also become highly politicized, which always leads to obfuscation and exaggeration in reporting. That doesn't mean I just make up my own theories and state them as fact, without looking up basic principles on the subject.

Yes, I try to not assume people who disagree with me politically (or even Teh Rich!!1) are inherently evil, unlike most of the Internet.

I thought the military had better tuition assistance than that, but you have to admit the taxpayers did pay for much of your college indirectly, assuming you were using your military salary for it before getting out.

The Occupadoes may tend towards the idealistic, but I don't think even they want anything as silly as "exact equal pay for everybody, no matter what", aside from maybe a few fringe loonies. I was talking about a Guaranteed Minimum Income in the sense of being independent of employment status or means, and also higher than a minimum wage job would supply by itself. I believe it's more properly termed a Basic Income Guarantee. Thomas Paine was a proponent of the idea, interestingly. It's probably something that would have to wait until the service sector becomes more automated and unemployment becomes an even bigger and more unavoidable issue.

Even if they raise taxes on income over $250K, you're only going to pay the higher rate on that bracket, so if you're making $275K it wouldn't be a big difference. It would be what? ~5% more on $25K of it? That's not really being heavily targeted at you. (I haven't seen the exact proposals, but I believe that's correct for the pre-Bush marginal rate) And if you're deep into it, like $500K/yr, then stop whining ya big baby, the government isn't exactly keeping you from being rich.

It would have been nice if the summary had stated what OMB stands for somewhere (Office of Management and Budget). I was trying to figure out if it was some wacky new term for Obama or his administration.

Whether by a reckoning of classical Newtonian physics or Quantum physics, wave theory or particle theory, we can't but deduce that a semi-closed system bombarded day and night, with less than 100% reflectivity and no alternative means of transmission or radiation, must increase it's energy level, i.e. increase in heat.

I stopped reading here. I've been trying to be more polite in my comments lately, but allow me to say: you're an idiot. You're a huge idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, and is probably too arrogant to bother trying to learn, because you'd rather make up your own assumptions about how things work, however incorrect they may be.

Are you under the impression that the Earth has always been continually getting hotter because its initial albedo is less than 100%? The energy gets re-emitted to space mostly in the infrared spectrum, or used to drive chemical reactions (photosynthesis, etc). Were the ice ages just a liberal myth too? According to you, global average temperatures should never go down.

So, you worked for the government at a job that paid for most of your higher education via taxpayer money? Clearly, you're just a dirty Socialist.

In all seriousness, I'm not really knocking you, but the whole "I did it all on my own" thing generally does turn out to be something of a myth when examined.

Equal pay regardless of work

I'm pretty sure this is something you just made up and applied to them, rather than what most of them actually want.

That said, I'm in favor of something along the lines of a guaranteed minimum income, as ever larger numbers of the population are likely to become essentially economically unecessary due to automation, and it's better than locking them up for turning to the illegal sector. And even I'd never say that people shouldn't be able to earn more than that doing whatever they could get paid for, or that all pay should be the same. Hell, I think more people would be accepting of laissez-faire free markets with their large income inqualities if they weren't dependent on them for basic living standards. A GMI is more of a long term thing though, I'm not sure if it's even economically viable at our current automation/productivity levels. More-socialized systems of healthcare and education (the latter of which you experienced a form of) are probably more important at the moment.