It seems to depend on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in office.
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Perhaps you could amplify the other messages then.
Hubble Space Telescope?
Sure, the outlook is great - but it’s a cold and lonely place. I don’t think I want to be HST, please speak only for yourself.
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I think they meant Harmonised Sales Tax. Who among us wouldn’t really like to be a sales tax that merges Federal and Provincial taxes into a simpler system?
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Who wouldn’t want to be Hawaiian Standard Time?
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You’re confused and not reading in context. I’m talking about where the country is going not where it is.
By all means, be offended though! 
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Funny in the sad way how the truth sounds to so many like news from Neptune.
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Growing income equality is a real thing and shouldn’t be a revelation to any readers of Boing Boing.
It is like our “leaders” looked at Mexico and other grosssly unequal nations and saw, instead of something to be avoided as a cultural path, a roadmap to the future that they wanted. “Yes, let’s have favelas surrounding guarded, gated districts that our police will protect. If the blacks everyone get out of line, the cops know what to do.”
or
“South Africa in 1960? Sounds great!!”
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Yes, or just the gated community mentality writ large.
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Are you suggesting basic income is a mainly libertarian idea? If so that’s not true at all, libertarians are late to the game, basic income is an old idea that’s been advocated by a lot of historical leftists like Fourier (see the short history here) and it’s still more commonly promoted by leftists than libertarians, as seen in the fact that the Green party platform includes it but the Libertarian party platform doesn’t, and also see this Jacobin piece I posted earlier talking about what a leftist basic income should look like.
As for leaving manual labor to the machines, that’s also an old leftist tradition, see Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism for example:
I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. … Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. … At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
This idea was also often bandied about by the New Left in the 1960s, for example p. 86 of the Port Authority Statement by one faction of SDS talked about “post-scarcity” and says:
The introduction of automation and rationalizing techniques and procedures in industrial organization also makes possible the social com- plexion of post-scarcity. The language of post-scarcity is the language of the fulfillment of all social needs and of non-compulsive labor.
Likewise, Abbie Hoffman in the Chicago 7 trial at one point read a list of demands from a document he titled “Revolution toward a free society, Yippie, by A. Yippie”, and one of them was "A society which works towards and actively promotes the concept of full unemployment, a society in which people are free from the drudgery of work, adoption of the concept ‘Let the machines do it.’ "
Lastly, I’m not saying “because these industrial jobs won’t last, we shouldn’t do anything to promote them in the U.S. today” as a Libertarian might–I think Obama’s bailout of the auto industry was a good thing for example–I’m just saying it’s a short-term solution.
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Both shot into the great void, one by rocket one by cannon.
Lonley indeed, speaking for both of them and myself…Oh,to be a socially adept particle collider or a cosseted LGBT gonzo re-enactor
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Are you suggesting basic income is a mainly libertarian idea?
No. Also not what I quoted.
Then what actual argument of mine were you responding to? My comment basically boiled down to “automation will destroy manufacturing within the next few decades so keeping those jobs in the U.S. can only be a fairly short-terms solution that even today won’t be able to employ nearly as many people as in the past, basic income is the best long-term solution.” Do you disagree with any of that, and if so do you see it as a libertarian argument?
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Well, there’s (D) (D) and then there’s (D) (D), gnome sayin’?
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Oh, come on, that list is ridiculous.
Use of the White House Pokestop is one of the powers granted specifically and exclusively to the President, right in the Constitution. No one else is getting access to those Pokeballs.
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I’m sick of it. Apparently they don’t teach “time zones” on the mainland, so our phone rings at 4AM all the time, most recently with Clinton robocalls.
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Your argument posits a fantasy where productivity gains return substantially to the economy. This is standard theory but because tech ideas are owned exclusively, neither the stock of real capital nor human capital are much improved.
Whether you think you are left soc. or left cap. on this issue is immaterial. It is what it is.
Why do you let your phone ring at 4am?
Mine is set to silent from 11 pm to 9 am.
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I can’t find the appropriate setting on my phone.
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