[quote=@catchamber] However, Gabe Newell is still the CEO of Valve. I can't speak for Valve, but I expect that certain actions in the company require approval from some form of manager, which is a form of managing labor. Someone has to ensure the facility meets certain standards, and that everyone is compensated as their contracts dictate. The same applies to The Bostwick-Braun Company, even if employees have a voice regarding how things are run. I agree that current corporate law puts significant authority in the hands of shareholders, primarily those that outrank colleagues with fewer shares. I suggest drafting legislation that forces them to become, or limiting your economic support to, companies that guarantee a greater voice to the employees and the shareholders with fewer shares. Shareholders contribute capital, even if they generate it through automated trading. Simply stripping them of wealth and hoping that fixes everything is as foolish as scrubbing a toilet once, and expecting it to stay clean forever. [/quote] Gaben actually doesn't have much power apart from being sort of a figure head in most respects. People on the team are free to pursue whatever projects they want, which may or may not include Gaben's role in development or managing the mundane. No one at Valve really tells anyone they have a concrete release date, since that'd interfere with their corporate culture. While this is why we haven't seen Half-Life 3 in a century, or why the next TF2 pyro update is taking so long it'll mean they release something that's more functional than an EA or Ubisoft title on launch and is more organically managed after the fact when the inevitable unforeseen or unaccounted for malfunction happens (*cough*MeetYourMatch*cough*). [quote] Automation isn't the issue, but how it's applied. [url=https://farmbot.io/]FarmBot Incorporated[/url] provides open sourced automated farming units that could indefinitely feed the unemployed. [/quote] You miss the entire point about being a working man in America, or really in much of the western world. No one wants a handout for existing, or very few people do. They want to feel as if they earned it, or at the least what they're working for doesn't escape their means of achieving through inflation via the free-market capitalist system. From as far back as the Great Depression there was an immense cultural stigma associated with getting handouts to help out non-working families that loomed over people as they went to collect even when they would otherwise die if they didn't. Up until today even among the young-left people aren't saying they want free-college they just want it to be affordable so it's something that can be considered an achievement having worked to get it. While there are some people who can't work for a number of reasons, just because we can automate all the processes to feed people for free doesn't mean it's the best sort of thing because for many people alive that would violate their sense of purpose; to do something for themselves to acquire the means by which to live or to acquire personal property. This has been the narrative I read about a lot when venturing through the leftist circles. Some groups in this circle openly sneer at the concept of the government or other people doing something for others in the name of socialism because that goes against the goals of socialism: to give to the workers collective ownership of their labor and the fruits of their labor. [quote] To provide a rebuttal to the Grapes of Wrath quote, "Why the fuck did the man with a tractor accept a contract that turned their asshole into a gaping chasm?" [/quote] Because his family would starve otherwise, the monster is sick, so he's gotta feed the monster, and the monster feeds him. Never mind the people he put under because he's gotta look out for his own. As was written in chapter 5: [quote] “Why, you’re Joe Davis’s boy!” “Sure,” the driver said. “Well, what you doing this kind of work for—against your own people?” “Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner—and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day.” “That’s right,” the tenant said. “But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?” And the driver said, “Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day. Times are changing, mister, don’t you know? Can’t make a living on the land unless you’ve got two, five, ten thousand acres and a tractor. Crop land isn’t for little guys like us any more. You don’t kick up a howl because you can’t make Fords, or because you’re not the telephone company. Well, crops are like that now. Nothing to do about it. You try to get three dollars a day someplace. That’s the only way.” [/quote] Gotta feed the chillern' on three dollars a day. Be damned if they starved. T'is as Vilage said. Is it really volunteering if the only other choice is to die?