TL;DR it became a shopping site in the Philippines and then went belly-up. True story.

Multiply was sold to some entity overseas. Apparently the shopping had always been there, but we were never really noticed. It was huge in Asia. Anyway, in December 2012, they shut down the social networking part of the site, which seemed really dumb because it turns out that the stores actually used the blog part of the site for their goods and there was actually never any sort of shopping cart system on the site to buy stuff.

So, yeah...the social stuff went away, and now the entire site is defunct because apparently just being a shopping site didn't work out. I think I got that all right.
http://multiply.com/

On the plus side, they did give us a lot of warning and allowed us to export all of our posts into a format that could be imported into blogger, which actually also conserved the comments. I posted my on its own blogger site and sometimes peruse it still for the memories.

To fix that problem you're going to have to fix the disparity in wealth, and the tax codes have only ever been a part of that disparity.

Thank you for pointing out the true source of the problems in the industrial sector when it comes to ages, emplyment, and compensation.

The declining fortunes of industrial workers have nothing to do with automation. They have everything to do with the siphoning of wealth from productive industries and workers towards the financial ascendancy and its backers. Wealth has been transfered upwards to the point where there is not enough of it to reward work in the way it was 40 years ago.

If you are not actually producing wealth, by adding value, then the distribution of wealth in society becomes a zero sum game. No level of automation can have an effect on this basic reality. If neither man nor robot is actually making "things", then stagnation becomes inevitable.

All of these are fundamentally positive changes.

So me having to wait for the shop attendant to come back from the john, or fumble to check out my out groceries, or wait longer for a waiter at a restaurant are all positive changes?

Positive for who exactly? All I see on my end is even more of my time being wasted.

A major grocery chain where I live brought in automated checkout machines. So instead of having by shopping scanned in by a trained professional, I was expected to scan in items myself in a poorly designed working area while a computer with the voice of a calm genteel London accept patiently and repeatedly insisted I scan the items again and again as the queue grew longer and longer behind me.

So, I started going to the shop down the road with people still behind the tills. The food is generally better there too.

If you're in prison, that's it, you're in prison.

Who put you there? Why are you and all these other people in there? Are you going to end up coming back here again? Why didn't we just shoot you the moment the judge struck the gavel? Is a prison supposed to have more functions than appeasing Daily Mail readers with petty acts of vindictiveness?

okay a primer here, all money is a debt. from the lowly penny to a 100 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. right now about 90% of all wealth is stored in computers, which are just well backed up data files. when people don't have enough money they turn to debt. the greater the need the more debt. which is ironic, since all money is debt, but i am getting sidetracked people like money which is a promissory note that the government will force other people to give you what you want in exchange for essentially worthless paper, in Zimbabwe the government was issuing a lot of money that they couldn't force anyone to accept.

as for people paying for goods well, what is it like right now? people get money to buy cars, houses, boats, travel, etc. and the banks use a magic formula for borrowing to people who will spend decades struggling to pay bills over people who have the money to do stuff, which are in a class of their own and most of those people's money is in the various stock markets, bonds etc, anything to make an elite class who fight to have money without having to work for it. i didn't budget and i 'have a taste' for credit cards, until i bankrupted. i won't repeat my life story here but i just paid off one of my credit cards, and the other one is under $1,000 yes they gave me credit cards right out of bankruptcy if you don't get one then they lower your rating. so really, will people still buy goods if they can get credit lines, but not jobs to repay those debts?

automation is a classic con for how we are gonna get rid of people earning debt in exchange for honest work. thing is, most of the people in my circles want their dollars to be in exchange for honest real work, supporting honest hard working folks. h&r block is the number one temporary work company more so than anyone else. h&r block uses some computers to have less back office people, but they still have their tax workers who provide people with a 'human' to deal with them. some in my circles refuses to enter any key-presses to automated telephone service lines they shout 'human' 'operator' etc and refuse to use a machine where a human being can do the work better in their mind. automation is the cry of a lonely twisted would be dictator. and it has been since the empire state building was built.

San Antonio. We're talking hard core here, not Austin.

What you got?

Use the handbrake. Countries in where it is usual to drive a manual transmission cars it is taught that you use the handbrake on hill starts. It takes very little practise to do flawless hill starts even on very steep inclines if you do it this way. It's taught this way in those countries for that reason.

He probably ought to blame himself. The interior photos I've found of the Tesla shows that the accelerator pedal is a different shape and is further back than the brake pedal, so if your feet are off all pedals and you randomly mash down, you'll catch the brake pedal before you catch the gas pedal.

If you have something better than liability insurance (and a Tesla owner is pretty likely to have fully comprehensive cover), your insurance will pay out to fix your own car if the crash was your fault.

Please be a user interface designer, not a user experience designer. If an interface is giving me an experience, it's getting in the way.

Sorry the transaction ratios are of the order of 80,000 to 1. I can't see this continuing as blocks become more and more difficult to verify.

Two things:
1) The transaction ratios here are of the order of 80 to 1, and the blocks chains are becoming ever more difficult to verify. How sustainable are these ratios as time marches on?

2) There is an inherant bias in verified blocks. Right now transactions are being selected, in part, based on their attached transaction fees. However, as the Bitcoin craze dies down, or even becomes mainstream, I don't see the practice of transactions fees catching on as individuals choose freeloading over payment.

Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible.

Almost everyone who transcts in Bitcoins is a tightwad libertarian looking to make a speculative quick buck. They will not, ever, collectively pay for transactions when they could freeload instead. The problem with Bitcoin was and will always remain how to persuade the marks/miners to keep expending computer power once the easy coins have all dried up.

This was evident to those of us 3 years ago, who casually downloaded the bitcoin client, left it run for a week or so, and saw not one coin in return. We (by which of course I mean "I") subsequently lost interest and uninstalled the client. I see nothing which can change this basic dynamic of most people not caring enough to mine/verify. Even if bitcoiners do start adding transaction fees (I regard this as a risible suggestion), the mining blocks will have everything tied up, again driving most of the mining network away.

The network was not built with a mandatory minimium transaction fee, or other mechanism to ensure the continued interest of those verifying the transactions -- those actually making the effort to keep Bitcoin running. This is the achilles heel and inevitable doom of the currency. You cannot build a currency on the collective individualism of Randroids.