I won't be answering any of the harder math, programming, and cryptography questions. If you want to come and help with that, that's be great, though those never seem to come up...
And yeah, if people at UF want to learn about bitcoin, by all means, tell them to come by

Hugh Jackman is Australian. And, really, he's so hot that it's not technically gay to want him inside of you.

Is it because they say, "Oh my! I am dreadfully sorry for making such a mess of things." While they are having an orgasm?

You guys are still just looking at unemployment in US and Europe, and forgetting that billions of new jobs were created in India, China, Russia, and South East Asia in just the last decade, with probably over a billion of those being middle class jobs, which almost didn't even exist in those countries before 2000's. All these were private sector jobs, not government.

I second this. Sometimes I just want to move funds between my own accounts. Besides, with merchant services options coming out soon, you guys are having to work on custom set fees, anyway, right?...

Went to get my yearly physical, found out I'm 170lb. I'm normally 155 to 160. Stupid $60 worth of 50%-Off Halloween candy. Guess no stripping with my fat ass at the BTC$1,000 party. FML.

But how will they spend money on R&D and on new robots, if they can't make the money on them due to unemployed people not being able to pay for their products? I.e. if unemployment reaches a certain level, and economy drops to a certain level, business won't be able to earn enough to continue to automate with robots (high initial investment, long term savings), and will be forced to hire people to do those simple jobs (low initial investment, higher long-term cost).

Donation sent to https://www.theroadhome.org
https://blockchain.info/tx/4bbab4ff3d3c3007d902c873ac8118914fc60ba4d4c7f0ab27f8915782207e74


and to http://www.volodalen.asso.fr/
https://blockchain.info/tx/de5549ffca1c816a787d171b3d28365529f69c499c4496c2e1f0ae46bee5872d

Nah, I think it's still ok. Besides, December isn't a real month, since a large chunk of it is eaten up by holidays and vacation time 

Convinced my hubby (told him he doesn't have a choice), so I'm going too. Will take a week traveling around Germany first, then finish the weekend with the party.

It's not. Chernobyl didn't have a containment building, and the vessel containing the nuclear materials had its lid blown off, so all the radioactive material was blown up into the atmosphere and surrounding areas. It was so bad that robots used to clean it kept shorting out and dying, so they ended up having people run out, one at a time, grab a chunk of the material, and chuck it back into the containment area or take it to a disposal area. It was so bad that each person could do it once for no longer than 15 to 30 seconds, and then be sent home.

I wonder if the level of Fukushima radiation would be more visible if it also was near a forest instead of near the ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest



You can see chernobyl station in the back

Mythbusters?! Booooo! Red Green is the only definitive authority on duct tape! He's done more with it than anyone else on the planet




Also, why can't I find any news of this on any mainstream news sources? Only ones seem to be reporting at this time are more right or conspiratorial type sites.

Also also, I'm getting a bit upset that this may be a bigger disaster than that of my native Ukraine. I hope it isn't, because I want my homeland to be #1! (In catastrophic nuclear disasters)

No no, I meant, if I was in a capitalist system, why would I make robots and things if there is no one who is able to afford those robots and things because they don't have a job or make too little money?
At some point this will have to hit some equilibrium, where I don't make any robots, or robots that can make things, if no one can afford those things. Actually, that's pretty much the constant equilibrium in capitalism: you only make things people can buy. And if the things you make put people out of a job, and they can no longer buy your stuff, well, then you stop making those things. It's like the bitcoin mining difficulty. You keep adding more hardware and keep mining until difficulty makes it unprofitable, and then you just sit around and wait until difficulty comes down, or price and profit margin goes up.

And the number of unemployed has increased by more than a billion around the world?

Well, I am planning on running a Bitcoin Experts table at the BTCMiami conference, just outside of the actual conference, so you don't even need a ticket to come see me and ask questions. I plan to have a few very basic things with me to demonstrate how bitcoin works, but can expand it into more of a training class type of thing, as opposed to just random questions people might have, like "how do I do cold storage, what happened with this country, what app can I use on this system" and so on.

Agriculture used to be plowing, seeding, tilling, and picking. If you look at just that, then yeah, there's even less than 2% of that now. Almost no one does it anymore, since that is done with machines and tractors. But that's not what agriculture means anymore. Now agriculture includes land surveys, irrigation systems, chemical research for new types of fertilizers and pesticides, product delivery and storage systems and research, and an enormous amount of research into genetic and biological engineering to make the food cheaper to grow and more resistant to disease and insects. All those people who used to be employed to move dirt around by hand are now free to do much more advanced (and less labor-intensive) things, and as a result we are able to grow a lot more food with a lot fewer resources. And yes, food is cheaper now. The price might not have changed, or maybe even seemed to go up, but you're forgetting inflation.



Of course. You will see the same thing in US if you look over the last decade. But if you look at the world as a whole, you see strongly positive number of new jobs (HUGELY strongly positive), which means, as I've said, that jobs are not disapearing, they are moving away to other developing countries.

Sold to whom? If robots end up making it so that no one can afford to pay for anything, then robots are not the most profitable option, is it.

That's your falacy right there. There's no transaition from one to the other. Otherwise we wouldn't still have agriculture and industry. We still have those things, but the jobs just changed. Aggriculture is now more about biological engineering, and industry is more about supply chains and making more efficient automation. We still have just as many people working, but now our farmers are working in bio and genetics labs, trying to improve plant growth and fertilizers, and our industry workers are figuring out how to source and transport materials in a more efficient way, ahd now to design robots that will assemble things in the quickest way possible while using the least amount of resources.


Because that is the very purpose of automation: make as much as possible, as quickly as possible, for as little as possible. Capitalism is all about efficiency (less waste = more profits), and by extension so is all the automation that capitalism has been pushing.



It's not faith, it's how things are actually working in the real world, right now. It's as much of a theory as any other science theory, like the theory of gravity. Automation, efficiency, things getting cheaper, and everything else. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Ok, do you know Joanne H., Bill B., Oleg T., Sewchand B., or Jeff R.? They are people I know who don't have jobs, they own businesses or do their own work as consultants. But they are not famous, or even well known, so they don't make good examples. But there are millions of examples like this. The only thing laughable is that you are still so dependent on a job that you think you will die without someone giving you one.


Well, let's look at the macro model of agriculture. Do you need to work from 6am to 7pm, doing difficult manual labor, in order to feed yourself? No. Automation replaced farming, so now you can do much simpler and easier work, and still get enough food.
How about the macro model of manufacturing? Do you need to work for weeks just to put together a car, or some other gadget, or pay close to $100,000 just to buy a car? No. Automation replaced most of the manual labor required to manufacture goods, and now you can do much simpler and easier work and still get things like cars and gadgets.

Do you see where the trend here is? Less work, and simpler work, to get the same type of stuff that required a lot of back breaking labor just a few decades ago. In the future, you may be able to afford food, a car, and whatever else you need, just for the labor of wiping down some robots with rags, and replacing a few screws.

Or, if you don't want to do that, you can always go do the hard labor of growing food yourself from scratch on some plot of land to survive.