insoluble

And here I thought I was the only one with a vertical side monitor. Then again, did you mean that both are vertical?

Before the industrial revolution, almost all manufacturing of common goods, including food, was performed by human hands and feet. This limited output capacity to that of human strength and endurance; and it was exhausting for humans, preventing most humans from having time or energy for intellectual activities.

On the contrary, there were a handful of areas where humans had already begun to exploit motion and force outside of human muscle to carry out work. One long-time example is using horses, mules, and other animals to provide force for transporting goods over distances. Even humans were payloads transported upon animal backs. Another key advancement for humans was using water and wind to transport large amounts of goods from one place to another. Sailboats allowed for transporting of goods a very long distance. In today's age we may take self-driving transport for granted, but once upon a time humans actually had to transport goods by hand and foot.

Why the industrial revolution was a powerful next step in exploiting nature is because it allowed not only transport of goods, but also finer, more complex tasks to be carried out without requiring human muscle. Now sewing, grinding, cutting, molding, bending, digging, and drilling could be done by machine in large quantities with good reproducibility.

Hence, first humans exploited nature (and other animals) for transporting goods. Then humans began exploiting oil, coal, and electricity for carrying out more complex physical tasks that require large amounts of force. As machines grew finer, they were able to manufacture smaller, more precise goods.

The next stage was to allow humans to carry out not only large scale physical tasks without continuous human effort, but also to carry out intellectual tasks in mass without continuous human effort. This is where computers come in. They exploit nature to get information processed quickly and reliably.

At least a few areas remain where humans are doing the heavy lifting. One is reproduction. Humans are still required to take care of new humans while they are brought from incapacity to self sufficiency. This is still a difficult, time-consuming task, especially if the goal is having quality output. Another area where humans still do heavy lifting is learning. Unfortunately learning has not become much more efficient or quicker than it was in the past. Humans are very slow at learning, and a massive human effort is generally involved.

Imagine a search engine that not only gave you search results, it used advanced AI to tell you in brief how each result applied to the problem you are currently trying to solve. Currently, you have to waste time thinking about each result to classify the contents, as for example, entertainment, product marketing, opinions and rants, purely factual, legal, political, social networking, media, API/interface, et cetera.

It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest. Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.

Is this a scientifically supported assessment? I say this because I have heard it often, but in thinking about it, I cannot see this necessarily being true. WPF uses XAML, which is similar to HTML or other markup languages in structure. Sure, this is much different than the paradigm where you specify coordinates for all window elements (Win32, WinForms, et al.), but is it proven than a person having no background knowledge or experience in software would find markup-based layout more difficult than coordinate-based layout? Even if so, is the difference big enough to warrant telling all newcomers to use a coordinate-based layout, despite its inherent lack of responsiveness? Yes, XAML has many additional features, particularly in terms of effects, but these need not be used.

So they say, but that doesn't mean its support is about to end. If you look at how long MS supports technologies, you can be pretty sure it has plenty of usable life. Plus, UWP is practically the exact same thing from a design and coding perspective, so the knowledge is by no means lost.

WPF is superior to Windows Forms in many ways, particularly layout responsiveness. I would not recommend anyone entering the Windows Desktop scene to use this old paradigm of UI design springing from Win32 (or older). Moreover, since WPF uses XAML, learning it (as opposed to Windows Forms) better prepares one for other popular UI frameworks these days, including for Web and Mobile. Also, if only newer OS versions are of concern, consider using Universal Apps (UWP) instead of WPF. They are both very similar, but UWP is newer.

Indeed a product often has value, but an idea without execution is an untested gamble.

The basic idea here is that arguing with reality is counter-productive. To be effective, one should embrace those changes that cannot be avoided.

For many in the field, a bigger issue than commoditisation is probably wage gaps between higher and lower cost regions of the globe. While it should not be expected that the average person can or even could compete with top-notch developers, for most of us, we still have to compete with good developers in extremely low-cost regions. Until the globe evens out in cost-of-living, this issue should continue to exist. Until quality programming and engineering do not require substantially above-average intelligence, these professions should not become a commodity.

In theory, a larger organisation would have more communication going on, and having messages that stand out among the noise would definitely set you apart. Moreover, the more people you communicate with, the less you know each person on a personal level -- the more impersonal each correspondent is. The less you know someone, the more important proper, clear language is.

> I don't really know of a defense other than ...

One way is to make sure you (a) provide real value and (b) know how to convey that knowledge effectively in tense situations. If you're not sure you provide real value, then BS talk may be your only hope. Even if you know you provide value, you need to be able to convince others of this or else you may be in trouble.

The underlying message here is very important to consider in this discussion. In many ways, the average human may already be outputting intelligent information about as fast as he or she can. If we really could think substantially faster than we can speak or type, then surely we could speak in mathematical formulae and in beautiful poetry at all times. When solving a complex mathematical problem, it seems most people have to stop and think periodically while writing steps and results. The processing is slower than the output. The main area where most humans are quick seems to be in visuospatial cognition, and this is perhaps the main area where we lack proper output capabilities. We need a parallel output system to complement the current serial output. Maybe if we had 64 mouths and ears we could convey information more quickly. Alternatively, a high resolution EEG could perhaps read all our muscle tones simultaneously. The tricky thing would be in training ourselves to output with all our muscles simultaneously, and the result might be a show in itself.

We must first consider the purpose of money and the purpose of employment. Money's purpose is to allow distribution of credit based on the amount of value that an individual or other entity has provided to society. Employment's purpose, in the broader sense of the term, is to allow an individual to provide services to society while expecting fair compensation in return. By "fair", I mean not unbalanced like slavery, where slaves indeed were compensated (with food and shelter) but not in a manner commensurate with their production.

Perhaps the biggest problem with common understanding on the topic of value is that people fail to distinguish not only how much value an entity produces but also what type of value an entity produces (or doesn't produce). If I buy a bank repo house for $50k and sell it for $250k after doing essentially nothing but posting some pictures and descriptions of the place Online, then the only value I actually created is in the pictures, descriptions, and paperwork that I did. Say I spent 30 hours doing all these tasks. Then say the average person would agree that a fair pay rate for this type of work (papers, pictures, descriptions, and some phone calls) is $50/hour. The real value that I would have created would thus be 30x50, or $1500. Yet the sale of this property would net me at least $180k, after any expenses. Note the difference between value created (<$2k) and net gain ($180k).

The problem here is the discrepancy between value created and money "earned". It seems that a large portion of society is okay with this discrepancy. For example, many people see nothing wrong with gambling or Lottery, despite both involving accumulation and distribution of money without any value being created. Until the majority of society agrees that people shouldn't be paid more than the value they personally create, we can expect extreme income inequality to exist and persist. If ever society can change its mind on this matter, we might expect the following:

1. There is an income cap, based on the realistic maximum amount of value that a human can create. The actual value is based on scientific investigation into the amount of value (not money, but actual value to society) created by the smartest and most skilled humans. The cap would be somewhere in the ball park of this maximum value (perhaps a little higher, just for good measure). For example, I am willing to bet that a human is not capable of creating more than 100x that of the average (median) human in terms of real value. Every time we look at a scientific advancement of the past, we see that although person X came up with the idea first (and hence usually got all the credit for it), there were a bunch of other people working on the same idea, many of which only a handful of years behind X. Not only that, but the person usually was in the right place and right time, with the right connections, to achieve what he or she did. If you took random other persons and put them into that exact same situation, many would have accomplished a similar feat. Certain discoveries were meant to happen around certain times.

2. All now known and future known types of exploitation are prohibited. Any accumulation of wealth where the person gaining the wealth is not producing significant real value is outlawed. Such accumulation of wealth is deemed to be in the same category as counterfeiting since it funnels money from the actual producers to someone else. Examples such as the real-estate investor described above would be eliminated by government programs whose purpose is to deal with such situations as bank repo properties in a responsible and production-centric manner.

3. There are well-funded government programs whose purpose is to facilitate relocation of individuals currently working in non-productive positions into positions that make a positive difference for society. These programs are optional for these individuals, but nevertheless any non-productive positions are phased out of society.

4. Inheritance is capped at half of one lifetime's worth of median income (based on society in general). Hence, if the average person makes $6M in his or her lifetime, then $3M would be the maximum allowed by anyone to be passed on to any heirs. Remember: The goal is to promote productive individuals, so we cannot have people born into a life that doesn't require being productive.

I'm sure a bunch more changes would be needed for the best result, but the above may serve as food for thought.