Food? Okay. A poor person 100 years ago would starve for want of food. Today they contract diabetes because the cheapest food is the worst for you. So, what is a necessity: the 2,000 calories a day you need to survive, or a healthy, balanced diet?

Shelter? Alright. Does each person deserve their own room? How much square footage? What about hot and cold running water, and electricity. Neither of these would have been considered a necessity 100 years ago.

What about a toothbrush? Necessity for dental health, or luxury you can do without?

Health care: what is a necessity? Yearly checkups, cancer screenings, heart transplants? Gym memberships to prevent the dreaded obesity? Dietary supplements?

Computers? 20 years ago giving a computer to a kid would have sounded foolish. Today it’s considered a necessary tool to succeed in education.

The truth is, many things that are considered necessities today were luxuries 20-50-100 years ago. What does this say about society and technology? That it has improved the quality of life for people of all income levels. Would you rather be in the bottom 10% of income today, or 100 years ago?

If you propose providing “the basic necessities” for all people, you have to be prepared to do some soul-searching to determine exactly what this means.

And unlike every other invention in the history of humanity, this one will maintain itself, trouble-free. Nobody has to go to college and learn nanorobotics.

Not if they don’t want to. Only if they want luxuries and entertainment.

Most people do; bare survival doesn’t seem to be a prospect that most people are interested in. So your grousing doesn’t seem to have much point. People don’t enter technical fields simply to survive – that would be impossible, because you’d starve to death before you finished school. People enter technical or professional fields to command professional salaries, or because they love doing it, or both. I don’t see how that would be affected simply by discovering a way to hand out free food at no cost.

Engineers require payment, no matter how cool the toys are that they get to play with.

I still don’t understand why you think I’m predicting the end of money. Haven’t I repeatedly told you that I’m a capitalist, and that I believe capitalism is the most efficient solution for distributing and valuing resources that aren’t essential to life?

Quit arguing a strawman, Robert, and grapple with my actual point. It grows rather wearisome to shadow-box with you.

What I meant was, why should I let you feed off my technical genius for free?

Your technical genius? I doubt you did it alone. At best you stood on the shoulders of giants, and even in that case, you owe society a considerable debt for all the stuff we did for you while you were tinkering around with nanotech assemblers. So the real question is, why shouldn’t you have to repay that debt?

Anyway, be an asshole all you like. What are you going to do when your first customer buys your assemblers and then uses them to assemble more assemblers, and hands them out for free? These things are getting out, Robert. There’s just no question about it.

The sun shone for free in the Paleolithic era, and intelligent use of lithic technology let us convert that into tasty food – nuts, berries, and mastodon steak, mmm mmm good.

Indeed. And nobody had to pay the plants to grow, or the mastodons to live. The food was there for you to hunt or gather. (Hence, “hunter-gatherers.”) If you weren’t willing to pay someone else’s prices for the food they had gathered, you were perfectly free to gather your own. You could always provide for yourself, if you liked. Paying someone else to do that was an option.

Now, it has become a necessity. There’s literally no way for the majority of human beings to gather their own food. And that’s textbook extortion.

Pay them, or starve.

They get paid by everybody who wants to use nanotech to make a non-essential item – by people who are using it for luxury and entertainment. There will still be plenty of jobs that need to be done. It’s simply the case that employers won’t be able to rely on the expolitative labor of people who need to work to live in order to fill those jobs. Unless you believe that an employer has the right to exploit their workforce? I guess I’d like to see you justify that.

Yeah, Chet, I’ve heard of it.

Whose labor paid for the ten trillion dollars it took to do the research and build the first fab plant? Last I checked, those guys don’t work for free.

The assemblers come to you. They’re already where you’re at. Nobody needs to truck anything anywhere; everything the assemblers need is already everywhere.

Uh huh. And unlike every other invention in the history of humanity, this one will maintain itself, trouble-free. Nobody has to go to college and learn nanorobotics. Nobody has to pull ten hour shifts trying to figure out why the latest batch of assemblers keeps producing John Tesh CDs instead of hamburger. (Nobody pulled the ten-hour shift designing the latest batch, for that matter.)

You sound like one of the people at the beginning of the steam era, foreseeing the end of labor. Sorry, man. Nothing is simple; nothing is easy. Things break, things go to shit, things have to get fixed, things have to be designed. Six-bong-hit futurists rapping about how awesome it will be once the nanomachines do everything for us are not going to do those things; engineers will.

Engineers require payment, no matter how cool the toys are that they get to play with. It takes time and energy to become mentally proficient in anything. People will require compensation for that time and energy.

Can nanotech make us a whole lot richer? Probably. That’ll be cool. But just like atomic power, and steam power, and the assembly line, and every other brilliant innovation which has drastically increased our wealth, increasing wealth and nobody-has-to-work-ever-again aren’t the same thing.

If you don’t like the idea of being reliant on someone else’s technical genius…

Sorry, I didn’t phrase that clearly. What I meant was, why should I let you feed off my technical genius for free? I’ve invented nanorobots. Damned if I’m releasing them into the wild to make burgers for hippies; pay me through the nose for them, or get the fuck out.

But the sun shines for free, and that energy input, used intelligently through technology, supplies everything we need to live…I’m referring to a technology that literally uses the sun’s energy to create free lunches.

A technology that doesn’t exist yet, chief – and which will require trillions in capital and a buttload of skull sweat, if it works at all.

The sun shone for free in the Paleolithic era, and intelligent use of lithic technology let us convert that into tasty food – nuts, berries, and mastodon steak, mmm mmm good. The sun has “provided everything we need to live” since the beginning of time – it still takes work to get it.

The wedge – the amount of human labor per unit of sunshine to get it turned into the necessities of life – may well be increased dramatically yet again by nanotech (although I’d lay more money on space elevators); it’s already happened many times. But reducing a cost to “not so much, considering” is not the same thing as reducing it to zero. So ten people have to work in the nanoplant instead of 100 working at the space complex instead of 1000 working at the factory farm instead of 100000 working at subsistence agriculture – it’s still people working, it’s still people getting paid, and it’s still the horrible crime of people having to work to live because those workers didn’t go to college to donate their time.

Pay them, or starve.

volunterism IE that people, as neither slave nor master to each other VOLUNTARILY engage in trade …. that I have something of value YOU want, that you have something of value I want and we dicker until an agreement is reached or we go our own way until we find the deal we are satisfied with.

Where is the “volunteerism” if what you have is something that I need to buy? That I literally can’t survive without?

If I have no choice but to buy, but you have a choice about whether or not to sell, that’s not capitalism, that’s extortion. It is, legally. Look it up.

Why should anybody’s survival be based on their willingness to be a victim of extortion? That’s not capitalism; that’s slavery.

And it is going to come as a crushing blow to your ego I am sure, but the patrons and employees of Wal Mart and the local pizzeria don’t give a flying rat’s ass whether you think it benefits society or not, they are living their lives and spending their money as they see fit and of their own free will.

It’s free will that I’m concerned about. Nobody who’s being extorted by pseudo-capitalism has truly free will. Nobody who has to make the choice between dying and working a job they don’t enjoy has truly free will. Oh, sure, you can say that they could always choose to die, but that’s a joke. That’s Hobson’s choice. It’s like “any color you want as long as it’s black.” Anybody who mistook that as an actual choice should just excuse themselves from the discussion, now.

Chet,I’ve decided you must be a Liberal Arts major.Think through what it means if everyone gets to set their own wage.You’ve just described capitalism.

No, capitalism is where others set your wage. You don’t tell your boss how much you want to work for; the bosses – at your company, and at the other companies you could concievably work for – tell you how much you’re going to make.

People are fee to value their efforts however they want.What bothers you is other people are also allowwed to value one’s efforts.And Chet,there’s an awful lot of money that goes to people who won’t or can’t support themselves

About ten times the amount of federal money you’re thinking of goes to people who already have enough, by far, to support themselves. That’s the greater waste. How could anyone disagree?

Who builds and maintains the nanotech assemblers?

They build themselves. (That’s why they’re called “assemblers”, they build things, including more of themselves. You’ve never heard of this stuff?)

Who shovels the shit into trucks and drives the trucks to the assembly plant?

The assemblers come to you. They’re already where you’re at. Nobody needs to truck anything anywhere; everything the assemblers need is already everywhere.

Why should your survival as an individual rely on another person’s technological genius in creating the machinery that keeps you alive?

Everybody’s survival already relies on that. Do you think the Earth can support 6 billion people on simple agriculture? Please.

If you don’t like the idea of being reliant on someone else’s technical genius, then you’d better shut off your computer, turn off your water and sewer, and move into a cave. We’re way beyond the point of debate in regards to technology being critical to our survival. Beyond by about 2000 years, I would say.

What about you makes you worthy to steal the product of someone else’s labor?

I don’t see how it’s stealing another person’s labor. The crime is that others have to labor for us all to live. But the sun shines for free, and that energy input, used intelligently through technology, supplies everything we need to live. Everything else, like entertainment or luxury, capitalism apportions. What’s the problem with that? I’m not proposing a government that hands out free TV’s, I’m referring to a technology that literally uses the sun’s energy to create free lunches.

It’s also my opinion that if MRAs and FRAs are serious about their commitment to custody rights issues, many solutions to what ails them are in this book.

Especially since as of about 1998, it’s up to $.75, and even in the uber-liberal NYU courses, they admitted that when you control for time off to raise kids, etc., it’s actually $.98/$1.00. Childless women make as much as men when they go into the same careers.

Kate is probably right that the $.75 would even out too if more men stayed home and if businesses were more family-friendly. And it makes sense to ask why these things are not more common.

But too often this statistic is carelessly thrown around to make it appear that Business A is hiring Joe Entrylevel at $1.00/hour, but Sally Entrylevel at $.65/hour, for the same exact position on the same exact resume. *That* is what is not the case, and has been illegal since the ’70′s. Anyone who sees that happening at their company should file a whopping lawsuit, not blog about it quietly.

The $.65/$1 canard has got to be retired. Please.

Firstly, you don’t pay men to do what you could just as well havea women do, thus the predominance of women in traditional roles such as cashier, CNA, hotel maids, etc. Women are willing to do that work and often are not given the opportunity to move out such, unless they are willing to “go against the grain” of social convention (more on that later). A few token women in one or another non-traditional field does not serve to set the standards or overcome the statistics.

I’d love to retire it, I’d love to retire a lot of patriartchal insistutions that persist. And yes it makes no sense, but I see it everyday and the stats prove it out consistently. Patriarchy hangs on despite the fact that it isn’t economically wise. It continues to flourish because those who chose to believe it and can practice it hold positions that allow them to perpetuate it — obviously patriarchy worked just fine for them, so why change it?

The old guard also has reason to fear the movement of women into their men-dominated trades/careers/positions because obviously the influx of available labor, much less the womens’ willingness to work for less with drive could drive down their rates overall.

Presently there is a serious shortage of people to fill positions in the building and related trades. Do you seem women being actively recruited? Do you see men who predominate the hiring/firing positions looking to encourage women to fill these well paying positions? Do you see women flocking to fill these positions of good pay, usually good working hours and for the most part work that is not too physically demanding for the average woman (despite popular mythology to the contrary)?

What about such areas as surgery? How about heart surgerns do you see around? Ask any woman surgeon about the patriarchy in that career and see what they’ll tell you.

How many men are staying at home to care for the kids?

When I see the numbers in those areas rise according in contradicition to past history and present rates, then I’ll be convinced that sexism in the workplace doesn’t exist.

So give me a break — puh–lease!

And “the poor” are not some permanent monolythe. The vast majority of “poor” pass through that status within a 5 year window. The college kids with cinderblock and plank bookshelves in a tiny studio apartment eating raman noodles, the single mom with a young child who is taking night classes, the throw away kid from the abusive family who strikes out on his own, joins the military and later gets his college degree via GI bill. The “permanent” poor are a very small percentage with such profound problems that something like a “living wage” will not make any difference.

Typical response from someone who hasn’t been exposed to the culture of poverty. Poverty is insidious and it is mult-generational and it is also supported by our social infrastructure. But you have to live with those people to see it and understand it. Your response illustrates the wide cultural divide that exists.

Most often people do not move out of their lower-class status and into the middle class, this has been proven time and time again through scientific observation and anyone who has had experience with people in the lower income strata beyond college students or in their professional work life, can easily see this.

Most of those who enter into military service do not utilize their ability to go to college through the GI bill and if they do, few come out earning enough to move them out of the class they were born into, if they even finish. Most impoverished families do not value college or see it as a recourse out of poverty as their economic situation does not allow them to see past next month or tomorrow.

The left has been gathering the numbers and doing the research since the sixties to show that children from impoverished families start with a distinct disadvantage that only widens as they mature. The right and those who want to believe that poverty doesn’t exist or isn’t a systemic problem in this country, consistently trump out some token or another of success, but the numbers show that the vast majority of people stay in the class in which they were born and that means economic class.

Also, with educational limitations from early on and cultural division, impoverished children learn less and less how to fend for themselves in a middle class environment and exhibit language, values and attitudes that seperate them from those they most need to emulate in order to “fit in”, gain exceptance and succeed.

Most often, due to this, the further down the economic strata you travel, the more you will find women who are trapped even deeper in poverty and traditional roles than their middle class counterparts.

Anyway, if this conclusion, that a “five year window” existed in which people “passed through” poverty, then why are ghettos and impoverished small towns filled with people who’ve lived there generation after generation with no hope of improvement?

Time for a good French joke here.

that why women are paid on average .65 to every dollar a man makes when doing the same work?

Please go back and read the stats because that is plain not true.

And it doesn’t make any business sense either. I mean, think about it. If I am running a business and I can get exactly the same work, experience, etc from a woman at 65 cents to having to pay a man $1, why should I employ any men at all?

The $.65/$1 canard has got to be retired. Please.

Jobs that pay $7/hr are entry level jobs. First rung jobs for teens who have no experience or possibly retired people looking to get out of the house.

And “the poor” are not some permanent monolythe. The vast majority of “poor” pass through that status within a 5 year window. The college kids with cinderblock and plank bookshelves in a tiny studio apartment eating raman noodles, the single mom with a young child who is taking night classes, the throw away kid from the abusive family who strikes out on his own, joins the military and later gets his college degree via GI bill. The “permanent” poor are a very small percentage with such profound problems that something like a “living wage” will not make any difference.