Phil started with a snippet from an essay by "Bruno Argent" (Bruce Sterling) in Seed magazine online:

We now come to the useful word "precarity," which is part of the American lifestyle but distant from American politics. "Precarity" is, of course, the condition of existing precariously. The condition of losing one's safety and security, of losing predictability and the ability to rationally plan ahead, the condition of being humiliated and in danger.

"Precarity" has much to do with the need for a steady income, for predictable hours of work, for a humane respect from one's employer and a need not to be unjustly fired. Below this thin shell of labor-management relations is the deeper, more primal nature of European precarity. It is found in our time-honored European predilection for abject misery, political extremism, totalitarian violence against the dignity of the individual, and world wars.

Normally Americans and Europeans fail to agree about "precarity" — Americans think their precarity is a kind of fluidity and dynamism, while Europeans are lazy featherbedders dawdling over two-hour lunches. But what's certain is that, whatever its definition, precarity is now global. The wealthy and powerful — especially the wealthy and powerful — are precarious. They are being flung about like flotsam, and the precarity once reserved for blue-collar workers is now inside the corner office and the corporate boardroom as well.

This means that we all have new chances to see eye-to-eye on major global economic issues such as currency flows and the aging population. Italy is leading the way in aging — we're the oldest country in Europe — and business stabilized remarkably when we rid ourselves of the comically useless Italian lira. It's proof that people can both adapt to the inevitable and make some bold steps.

To kick of the discussion, Phil raised the following questions:

Do free markets assume that life must be precarious?

Do socialist programs eliminate precarity?

Can we achieve sufficient material abundance that precarity is removed from survival and shifted to other areas?

The group then went through a list of possible ways of getting to a world without scarcity, with the fifth item contributed by listener OKDavidRay:

1. Pure Technology -- replicators and robots produce abundance for all with limited or no government involvement

2. Pure Government -- social engineering and economic restructuring eliminate scarcity without reliance on (further) technological breakthroughs

3. Government / Technology Hybrid --various kinds of partnership between technological developments and government restructuring

4. Economic Singularity -- AIs / posthuman intelligence takes the matter out of our hands and provide us a world of limitless abundance

5. Virtual Worlds -- Transcend scarcity by moving to a new substrate where physical scarcity is not an issue.

For each, the group considered the following questions:

• What are the advantages?
• What are the drawbacks?
• What is the likelihood?

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from the other chris hardy. The song is "frame by frame."

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