But not all designs for growing consumer goods will be open-sourced. Big name designers will still want to be paid for their designs, even if you grow that fancy Gucci purse or Armani suit at home. Sure, when billions of people can buy them, the price will be driven down to that of a bar of soap. But some money will still have to come from somewhere.

But this will lead to a great flowering of creativity as millions of people start making their own designs with their household CAD/CAMs.

I mentioned this at Space.com when discussing how quickly robots will spread when they can operate 3-D printers that produce more printers and robots. One commenter accused me of being a “Luddist” (he meant Luddite) and another laughed at me, stating that he had studied Cloward and Piven.

I hadn’t heard of these two, so searched them out and found:

Cloward–Piven strategy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.

There is a lot more to that entry and it is worth reading.
Unemployment driven by automation and robotization will in time bring about the crisis foretold by Cloward and Piven.

I’ll keep saying what I’ve been saying all along: money will not have the same meaning as we change into a technologically-driven society (something which we already are in many ways). New monetary systems are desperately needed.

This has all led to a massive transfer from labor to capital, perpetrated since these policies really started having effect (the early 1970s; real median per capita income has been stagnant since that time).

There is a lot of money to be made by shills for capital rationalizing these policies, so any criticism of them is inevitably met by vituperation from that corner (and its unwitting dupes).

As for this particular study, its a good example of the fallacy of precision (additional cloud computing based GDP growth will average .83%… .83, not .85 or .81… what nonsense; it is simply impossible to estimate such things with any precision at all, because estimates are dependent upon too many assumptions, the contributing factors are too complex/unknowable, magnitude/presence of various effects are also unknown, etc.)
This sounds like propaganda for the cloud computing enthusiasts/happy talk about technology. To be honest, it’s probably just techno-enthusiasm produced by academics who need to publish in this area to advance their careers (which is to say, the biases are probably more inherent in the nature of writing on the subject than the direct product of discernible industry influence [unlike immigration/trade policy], which would certainly be more interesting to discuss than the bourgeois careerism of a bunch of professors).

I heard the Republican National Committee talking on the radio earlier this morning. They were bemoaning that one reason they lost the election is that they can’t reach the 18-to29-year-old voters. But then the speaker had to crack, “These people are all living in their parent’s basements and they think that’s fine.” Then he went on to rant that this was socialism.

No. It’s unemployment. These young people all want their own jobs so they can move out into their own apartments. It’s automation and robotization that are keeping them out of work, not “their own puny will.”
(I quote Poe, because unemployment is a horror story when you are living it.) (The quote is from “The Tomb of Ligeia.”) (Living in your parent’s basement can feel like you are entombed alive, as in “The House of Usher.”)

I'd like to know who paid for this study ( http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/photostory/2240149038/Top-10-cloud-providers-of-2012/1/ ).