brmj

I've seen one of a different design in a small town in Ohio since earlier this week. Interesting.

I'd like to briefly point out that the "economic oligarchy" argument is just a special case of one of the classic Marxist arguments against capitalism in general. Take that as you will.

I sit on an Ikea stool. I'm essentially spending my summer doing sysadmin gruntwork at a tiny data center in an outbuilding in someone's backyard for less than the median wage of a Wal-Mart "sales associate", so perhaps that is to be expected. On a related note, if anyone has a use for an intern with functional programming experience please let me know.

Solaris isn't your only option. Various BSDs support ZFS quite well.

I assert that, in principle, any labor performed by humans may be replaced by equivalent labor performed by machines, and that as technology advances, the fraction which may be cost-effectively replaced will increase, most likely going to 1 shortly after the invention of strong AI.

I also assert that the total amount of labor which a finite population can productively make use of at once is finite.

It follows that if technology continues to advance, there will reach a point at which less human labor is can be productively made use of than is available.

Under a capitalist system, people who don't own the means of production must exchange their labor for anything they need. Therefor, this set of facts would predict that continued technological advancement within a purely capitalist system would eventually lead to starvation amid plenty once human labor becomes close to valueless. Rather than halting the progress of technological advancement, replacing the capitalism with either collective ownership of the means of production or a sort of vestigial capitalism with massive entitlement programs at or before that point seems like the way to go to me.

In this case, the internet is definitely your friend. Also, it is worth noting that there are a lot of technical people who graduate from RIT and pick up some ASL while there to better interact with the NTID students. At some point you may be able to use that to your advantage, though It is really up to your creativity or luck to figure out how.

In any case, good luck.

I actually hoard quite a bit of information for that, among other, contingencies. I've got engineering textbooks of all kinds, a book on the preservation of library books, books on metallurgy, a book on vacuum tube design, military survival manuals, medical textbooks, a book of constants and equations, chemistry textbooks, a Debian mirror and quite a bit more random stuff I've thought might be useful. It lives on several computers, plus some books in dead tree format. I have everything I'd need to devise a way to power any one of those computers without electricity from the grid essentially on demand. I probably ought to keep an archive of all that on optical disks, but if there's an EMP I'm pretty much screwed anyway.

I'm not a survivalist or something, I just started doing this on a whim because I was procrastinating on something. I honestly expect to never need most of it, but having my own Debian mirror is very convenient.

As a long time GNU+Linux user, I would be fine with being forced to use Linux or FreeBSD. As a matter of general principal, however, I am opposed to such OS requirements when they extend beyond reasonable security and comparability concerns. I wouldn't work for a company that required employees to use Windows, OSX or Solaris.

That is depressingly likely. However, the user who made the post that started it all had been a redditer for over a year and posts on a number of topics, so if your theory is correct they were fairly subtle about it.

Believe it or not,it has only been 17 days since the post that started it all.