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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Financial systems have been hacked since the beginning and now the hacking is getting worse.

Regulations will make it progressively harder for newcomers to compete in the marketplace, executive pay will keep rising, corporations will get bigger. Owners of capital won't be able to trust outsiders so they will only recruit their family and close friends into well-paid executive positions. Advertising will completely dominate consumer behaviour; small businesses will disappear; once virtual reality takes over, corporations will make sure that customers forget that these small companies even exist.

Machines will replace people in the workplace. The rich won't care because at that point; because of social tensions and advertising, rich people will have grown to literally hate the poor and want them dead.

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Humor aside, the real crimes are the systemic from the top, like the Libor clowns, which will erase public trust at some point, which will cause the public go back to keeping money in mattresses.

Fortunately there are some small wins, like these little fish going to jail: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36737666 but we need to keep it up and restore accountability.

At that point money won't be worth putting under mattresses but water and food will.

In The Netherlands they come up with oath:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-04-01/dutch-ban...

Yes, I think 'honesty', 'trust' and 'reputation' used to be very important in the old days but not so much now - The system is extremely generous when it comes to giving people 'second chances'.

In our semi-globalized world, you can take HUGE risks and make a COMPLETE MESS of your reputation and credit rating in your home country, but then you can move to a different country (and often, you can also bring along your dirty money with you) and start fresh as though nothing ever happened. Unless you're a major public figure; no one will know what a crook you are.

A partially-globalized world is a perfect world for crooks. I think we should either give up on globalization completely or go full steam ahead and merge into a 'world government' under which everyone can be held accountable for their past behaviour without any loopholes.

We don't need a global government as much as a global reputation system, and we're slowly moving towards that direction. It's especially true of the United States and Europe--if you screw up big time there, it's easy to find out, and it's not like authoritarian regimes outside the west have any incentive to protect the reputations of western companies via censorship.

You didn't finish the story!

(spoiler alert: poor rising up, overthrowing, etc.)

or, the more likely ending where the poor is subjugated and enslaved as man-servants. Like in the old days of kings and warlords.

Today, nobody would want to feed all those mouths, not much to extract from them.

Why would you want to enslave much people today, especially when half of them are expected to be of age 40+?

World war is always an option. Did wonders the two last times.

It won't work this time. Cynically speaking, it's too expensive today per soul liberated.

Nobody would survive that with today's technology. This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

> Why would you want to enslave much people today, especially when half of them are expected to be of age 40+?

Likely because machines are single function and people are multifunction, you'll also need people to maintain those machines.

Then there is the less savory reasons.

You don't need that many people for tending to machines and you don't need that many people for "less savory reasons".

Even then, VR will eventually be as good for "less savory reasons" as the real thing.

The ending is more likely to be; the poor rise up in an attempt to overthrow the system - In response to this, robots/drones (owned by and working for the interest of the rich) will automatically kill all poor people.

Then the robots will use the bodies of poor people as fertilizer for crops.

The rich won't even know that there was an uprising at all (the robots won't report it) - Because the robots' only duties will be to increase the comfort and happiness of their masters - No need to encumber their masters with 'operational details' related to the 'management' of 'wildlife' and and agriculture.

It already happened in history many times. Remember kings and royal families ? This will end like it always do, people will rise in new revolution after witch new system will emerge from dust.

This new system has been vetted by whom how far in advance? If it's like the shenanigans of the Fed and too big to fail banks during 2008, I don't see how people trust the new system. Why have only one new system? Part of blockchain based solutions is exactly because of the reduction in trust in traditional finance methods.

And how can it be shown that bad actors manipulating the old system haven't somehow seeded the new system for their future advantage (either to sabotage it, or more likely to just disappear with their gains from damaging the old system).

You know... This sounds awfully familiar. ;-)

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