True, but how long WILL it take? 10 years? 50? I don’t know. Nobody does. So we should be laying the groundwork in case change is rapid and disruptive.

See, that’s another assumption. We do not know how fast this is going to progress once this leaves the lab and enters the market. It could be less than 10 years to take hold. It might take 50. We should have plans to deal with change that’s more rapid than we currently expect.

This is actually in line with my thoughts. Tech changes the landscape, often for good and bad at the same time. The problem is people who treat that change as inherently good or bad as a given. We don’t know how autonomous driving will affect this country, because that effect depends not just on trucking, but on…

“New tech always changes the job picture” is true, which is also a rephrasing of my entire argument.

More lazy simplistic sentiment. WTF do you even mean by progress? Progress for you?

Oil doesn’t need that many people and is HIGHLY cyclical.

See, you’re getting closer. The problem isn’t that automation is killing jobs, it’s that it’s doing it faster than new industries are forming and too quick for displaced workers to adjust.

Shitty comparison is shitty because it lacks context. The world of a century ago is not the world today.

Entirely artificial? LOL As if anything with lasers or satellites isn’t entirely artificial.

Owe the bank $100,000 and they own you.

Move the goalposts all you want. Pedantry doesn’t change damn thing about this initiative.

What a childish statement. Really. Children have trouble realizing that two conflicting statements can be true. Adults, on the other hand, should be able to accept the fact that A) Other people have it worse and B) they are STILL being screwed over personally.

Then you didn’t look hard. Many cell carriers would restrict users to their curated WAP portal unless they paid for additional access. Many mobile providers in the developing world still have models very similar to this.

Hasn’t happened yet? The curated internet is older than most people’s experience with the web. This shit is just “AOL for the Developing World”. It’s “WAP portals by Facebook”. This idea has been tried again and again and it always fails, because it might be cheaper, but it’s a hell of a lot less usable.

That chart is a bit out of date. Wiki has one through 2015.

Lab demos aren’t necessarily meant to be taken whole-hog to market. Far more often, a commercial company will take one aspect of this technology and apply it to their existing product line. The result might be a minor evolution, maybe an increase from 15% to 16% efficiency (maybe not even that), but over time it adds…

Avatar was totally a childish film, as in, I saw movies like that as a child. It’s a big budget Fern Gully. Avatar on IMAX is a feast for the eyes, not the brain.

Millennials are not getting married because marriages are expensive and millennials have little money.

It’s only an argument if you can state the other side’s opinion in a way that they agree with. You don’t have to argue for it, you just have to prove you’re not misunderstanding it.

Governments? Dysfunction is common to ALL organizations, and the bigger the group the worse it is. Because organizations are groups of people, and people look out for themselves first, even at the expense of the greater whole.