I'm amused at how petty that billionaire's make-money-fa$t schemes are. Selling steaks? Tennis shoes? Bibles?

What other billionaire does this to get richer?

Ah, binary.

Yeah, in our money-obssessed world "ethics" is opt-in for businesses.

for us to just forget him.

You're free to make up your own definitions for words, but it makes communication difficult.

BTW, does Wotan exist? Do you "not believe he does" or "believe he doesn't" ?

And what do you call your position?

Fortunately they're exempt from any ethical duty.

Monotheism is the affirmative belief that there is no deity but yours.

Atheism means not believing in any gods.

I'm going to venture way out on a skinny limb and suggest that all mechanical processes are subject to quantum effects.

What you just said is super-creepy in a "one of us, one of us" kind of way. Have you ever read Brave New World?

Again, accumulation is a necessary mechanism of the system.

If you were running a centralized economic committee (like in the soviet system) then you need a way to figure out which committee members are making good decisions, and which are making poor ones. So one way is to give all the new ones a small portfolio and get rid of the ones that run it into the ground, and promote the ones that do well by giving them larger portfolios.

Under a free market system that allows personal ownership you're essentially doing the same thing. The people who make sound financial decisions will grow their wealth by making good choices of what to invest it in. The guy who sets up a really efficient trucking company in an area that has a lot of demand for transportation services will accumulate wealth. When his son takes over and stops maintaining the fleet and takes the proceeds of the company and buys a huge yacht, his wealth starts dropping.

When the government takes some percentage of profits and invests it into medical care, education, or roads, then we see general efficiency improvements across society (healthy educated people are more productive).

But if society were to take a chunk of wealth from people who've accumulated it and they handed it out as lump sum cheques to average people, you have to carefully consider what's actually happening. First of all, wealthy people don't have wealth sitting there in a bank account. Almost all of their wealth is in the form of shares of companies. So in order to pay the tax they have to sell a significant number of those shares on a market. That will drop the price of those shares, including the price of the shares sitting in people's retirement funds. So who is going to buy those shares? Who has the cash to actually buy them? It's not even clear to me that there's *this* much cash sitting around ready to buy shares. But what's certain is that the people who are getting the lump sum cheques in the mail are almost certainly not the ones buying those shares. So we're moving shares from people to some other people who have cash sitting around waiting for a good deal, and that cash is then paid to the government and given out to the population. Those people then spend it on, presumably consumables like food, clothes, televisions, electronic devices. Maybe a few of them pay off debts. Very few of them will invest it with the same economic smarts that lead to that wealth being created in the first place. So you forced the top wealth accumulators to sell their shares to some people who were sitting on a pile of cash, for a discount, and then you gave that pile of cash to the people who did nothing more than drive up inflation. I'm not sure this is good for the economy at all.

Paying a share of corporate profits to the government who use it to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure sounds like a better plan to me.

This is just the latest app produced by the "I could code this in a weekend" crowd.

It may go the opposite direction. If current water & agricultral "haves" become "have-nots" and vice versa due to changes in weather there will be endless wars as the "haves" try to maintain their position.

For cars?

He must have read that BS book that Oprah was promoting years ago called The Secret. "It is based on the belief of the pseudoscientific law of attraction, which claims that thought alone can influence objective circumstances within one's life."

Humans -- most of us -- don't think goblins are real, let alone important. But what if the AI has picked up on sparse evidence, so subtle that humans have never noticed it, that proves that goblins are real and need to be discussed more. It may be trying to save us from a pending gobocalypse.