9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

If you can supply widgets more cheaply, you can underprice the competition and capture the market (I'm talking more about basic commodities for survival, food, clean water, shelter, etc.). And of course the other companies will compete, have better robots, etc. and you'll have a race to the bottom (this even happens with 'luxury' goods like USB drives). If I can provide aluminum for cheaper, I can flood the market with it (which drives prices down, but I get the profit).

Secondly, we have plenty of charities -- if advanced labor saving devices existed, governments and others would funnel exising funds to acquire them and put them to use. Why pay for food stamps when you can give everyone their daily bread?

I think capitalism based on survival would eventually have to phase itself out -- it would move to virtual currency where people traded currency for optional goods/services they couldn't acquire with the machines (handcrafted xyz, live concert tickets, etc.).

I may really be on this plant thing, but I imagine a world where, at minimum, we get food/water "for free" from the tireless robotic background workers (like air) and everything else is based on human interest. I think humans have enough demonstrated charity to donate something like that once developed.

But, I think the bigger threat is this: a world where robots are advanced enough to provide everything is probably one where a sufficiently powerful country could take over everything.

If you want to go down the academia path, I'm sure the optimal course of action is different, but for private sector employment it doesn't get better than internships.

I've done a lot of interviewing, and while open source projects are valuable, they are largely not as valuable to a company as real industry experience. Now, this differs in degrees - if you're a core contributor to a well known library for example, I'd give that a lot more credence than "hacked on various open source things".

Research on campus also pales in effectiveness to industry experience. Software in industry has a lot of constraints and differences to hacking on your own time, at your own pace, and similarly has a lot of differences to academia.

This is supported by my interview experiences - I interview a lot of masters-level people with impressive rosters of research projects on their resumes, but many of them cannot code at all, to the point where I wonder what exactly they contributed to these projects, if anything. On the other hand, I've never interviewed someone way out to lunch who has a background interning at the "big names" (e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc).

Having a company with a very high hiring bar on your resume is like a gigantic stamp of approval - people know these companies hire tough, and if you passed their bar (and spent time there, and didn't get fired), you automatically have more cred than someone who worked on anonymous FOSS projects or his/her own projects.

For example: "Cue the complaints". Surely "Queue the complaints.", meaning that the complaints should start lining up, gets across the same meaning (which is of course "oh great, here come complaints").

This doesn't always work of course ("That's our queue" has an entirely different meaning), however where I see most complaints about "mis-usage", either actually works.

"[…] Our gross national product […] counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. […]"

In short, the GNP doesn't measure what we would really like to optimize, but we optimize it anyway, because it is easier to measure. Just like we would search for our keys under the lamppost, instead of near the car where we lost them.

Unemployment rate is similar. We don't want everybody to work full time. Most jobs are boring and tiring anyway. No, the goal should to reduce mandatory work. Blame Microsoft? Actually we should thank them. The problem is everyone needs a job, or else they grow broke and eventually homeless. Sure, we could try to give a job to everyone, but this is a suboptimal short-term solution. A better way would be to further reduce boring work (technology can do that), and lower the need for jobs at the same time (I don't know how to do it).

I think most HNers understand this: you're most free when you don't need to waste your time "making" money. So let's maximize free time instead of employment.