So, they're trying to become Morlocks?

That's why I was proposing "paying" them to work (at least work going to school/training programs if nothing else). Tie that together with not getting child-welfare payments unless their kids are "working" at school.

Over time, the idea that you have to "put in effort" to get compensation of some sort should sink in, and by providing a path for them to get extra schooling/training when they can't find a job (rather than just sitting around collecting welfare checks), you will end up getting a highly-skilled & flexible work force who can transition to whatever job the economy demands at any given moment without worrying about their family getting thrown out on the street.

If you do it right, you can also chuck out any requirement for stuff like minimum wages, since the ability to go back to get training without destroying your financial life will act as a form of job competition for any employer who thinks they can abuse and/or exploit their employees at will.

I just don't find this article news worthy.

So nice of you to decide that for the rest of us.

Let's not forget that pork often produces jobs.

You'd get more employment (and "stimulate" the economy more) if that same amount of pork was used simply to pay people at the bottom of the economic ladder to work on various things (perhaps even to go to school). But then you wouldn't be able to direct the money to your favorite political donors.

That's the easiest way to simulate a human brain, not necessarily the easiest way to create an AI.

If open source is the future, and hardware can be made dirt cheap anywhere on the planet, how is anyone going to make any money? Service?

Yes. Lots of work available for people to build & provide customized solutions to problems, especially if they can build those solutions without getting worried about being sued every time they slap some code together.

Not when there are 7 billion people on the planet. There'll be plenty more work than people available.

That means you can build potentially 7 billion customizations for any given tool - there would be plenty of work available, as long as people trying to prevent competition through legislation don't get in the way.

It is an alternative to the monkey test: Take a sales person from across the ahlloway and let him click on your application.

Last time I tried that, it took me forever to get the feces out of the keyboard.

Ask any parent: having young children "help" with the laundry ends up being more work.

But, still a pretty good bonding experience (assuming a threshold # of giggles is reached)!

It's striking how well that works. It's common to see wrecked cars where everything in front of the passenger compartment is crushed, but the windshield is unbroken and the passenger compartment is completely intact.

Amen... even ~15-20 years ago (the time is pretty fuzzy to me now), I was involved in a head-on (at about 30mph for each car) in a Honda Civic. My entire family was in the car with me, and had fortunately decided to put on their seat belts (which was kind of rare those days).

After the shock wore off, I got a chance to look at the totaled car. The engine compartment had perfectly crumpled underneath the passenger cage, and all of us passengers had gotten away with nothing more than bumps, bruises & a black eye or two (from smacking heads on the backs of the seats).

Damn impressive given the kinetic energy & momentum involved, and this was even before stuff like air bags & recent advances in material science, dummy testing & extensive computer modeling.

So, no problem if someone installs a proxy on your machine & uses it to surf child porn? I'm sure that it won't take long or have any impact on your reputation for you to explain to the nice law enforcement agents that it wasn't really you doing that sort of thing.

Yeah, after posting my comment, I thought about it a little more & realized that you wouldn't be able to pick up any more momentum via gravity slingshot after reaching the escape velocity, but I didn't know what the exact escape velocity from the Solar System was.

I see you completely ignored the overall point of my message and went immediately to the part of the comment that fed your own biases.

A big company doesn't need to buy off legislators if they can legally control enough vital resources. Once they have that control, they can force people to do things simply by threatening to withhold those resources. (I'm assuming that you'll agree that it is the usual "right" of a private property owner to be able to withhold access to that property from others.)

Microsoft or Comcast may be evil, but they can't force me into jail, suck dollars out of my paycheck, or draft me to go die in 'Nam or Iraq like government can.

Sure they can, if they gain enough power. If they gain control over some vital resources that you need for your survival (drinking water for instance), then you'll do pretty much anything they tell you to, or die. And that's just using basic private property rights; it doesn't even touch what they can do when they're rich enough to buy off legislators.

I wonder how long it would take to reach 25% of c by repeatedly slingshotting a large multi-generation colony ship around the Sun...

Trade is always mutually beneficial in the long run

The fact that you think so is an indication of how simplistic your view of economics is. It took me only 30 secs in Google to find this, and I believe there are other arguments still out there against the "trade is always mutually beneficial" overly-simplistic view.