rskar

Per https://smartasset.com/taxes/all-about-irs-form-1040ez, Form 1040EZ is discontinued; there is only a single redesigned Form 1040 for all filers to use.

TIOBE tracks the trends (or at least hopes to) of people looking to learn/re-learn/familiarize/re-familiarize themselves about whatever programming languages for whatever reasons. That's certainly the most one can really glean by the stats on searches of +"<language> programming". People who are "googling" so are not necessarily just starting out in the field, or learning in school, or researching to decide what language to use in some greenfield project. What's also likely is they are seeking employment someplace or recently got work on somebody's (perhaps legacy) software; i.e. they're searching for immediate professional interest.

StackOverflow attracts a population of programmers interested in regularly helping out other fellow programmers navigate through whatever arcana of tools and libraries and frameworks and languages etc. It will mostly be this set that takes the survey. It also seems that it is the web/mobile technologists that predominate, which is understandable considering how big a deal web/mobile is. There seem to be so many new&shiny things in that web/mobile sphere, year after year ("Web 2.0" is so early 2000's), and that's certain to keep the arcana wheel going.

Fun factoid: Stack Overflow was founded by Microsoft alumnus Joel Spolsky and developer/blogger Jeff Atwood. Spolsky, while Program Manager on the Excel team, designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy. Atwood says: "I was weaned as a software developer on ... Microsoft BASIC in the 80's... I continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's... I am now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity." (https://blog.codinghorror.com/about-me/). Spolsky still seems proud of Visual Basic: "I am always saying 'I could do that in a weekend in Visual Basic' when developers tell me some feature is going to take a year." (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow...). Visual Basic has long been the "most dreaded" language on Stack Overflow surveys, and in 2019 explicitly got dropped from that year's survey. The very fact that VB.NET manages to be in the top 10 of TIOBE, and VB clinging to the top 20 of TIOBE, has often been given as immediate evidence of why TIOBE should not be taken seriously.

I'm personally convinced that a strong case is made that connects leaded gasoline with high crime rates. Certainly larger police forces and legalized abortion and various public policies, etc., are also in the picture. But can it be said that lead abatement from gasoline, if not the top cause, is nonetheless among the most likely reasons for the reduction in crime rates over the past few decades?

Per https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-i..., retirees have a lifestyle of roughly $60k or so per year. At a more modest $50k, and assuming a portfolio of working assets from which to draw this $50k, that would be something like a portfolio of about $830k at 6%. Assuming a 6% yearly net gain on investments, then if you can somehow sock away about $33k per year, you might achieve FIRE status in 15 years.

So there you have it: The event horizon is based on how realistically you can soldier on and invest 66% of your target retirement income each year for 15 years. Not sure how realistic that is for most people, let alone this hypothetical 40-something in the doldrums.

I'm using 6% for sake of argument for no good reason, but it's the usual rate used in converting a pension into a lump-sum. It is possible to do much better - stock market has been about 8% to 11% on average. So maybe 6% works as a fudge-factor in this sort of planning versus life's many ups and downs.

Anyway, if one had 30 years towards this "$50k FIRE", then the yearly "at 6%" investing is $10k; at 20 years, $21k; 10 years, $56k.

But only variants can be null or empty...

That's true, only Variants can be Null (Null is a state of Variant); however, Empty is translated to whatever default value makes sense for some of the (non-Object, non-user-defined) data types:

    Dim s As String, d As Date, x As Single, y As Double, i As Integer
    s = Empty: d = Empty: x = Empty: y = Empty: i = Empty
    Debug.Print s, d, x, y, i

I'm sure someone has complained about Oracle's idea that empty strings are null values.

I have certainly complained about that: I mean, what's not to love about conflating "this field intentionally left blank" with "no certain value could be obtained for this field"? /s

...a rant about how nulls are a terrible offense against the true relational model...

By way of Wikipedia, found this: https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/TTM-TheAskewWall-pri.... A fine read. I am left wondering about how OUTER JOINs would be handled without NULLs. I am now also wondering if it was OUTER JOINs that made NULLs seem necessary.

Fun factoid, VBA/VB6 dichotomizes between the "NULL" of value (keyword Null) versus the "null" of reference (keyword Nothing).

    Dim x
    x = Null
    
    Debug.Print "x", x
    Debug.Print "x = x", x = x
    Debug.Print "x <> x", x <> x
    Debug.Print "x = 0", x = 0
    Debug.Print "0 = x", 0 = x
    Debug.Print "0 + x", 0 + x
 

    Dim y
    y = Nothing
    Debug.Print "y", y

Fruit juices should be seen as a form of processed sugar - even if the processing is not as substantial as making table sugar. Whole fruit - such as a whole orange or grape or apple - is a much better and nutritional choice.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/fruit-juice-sugary-dri...

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/juice-and-diabetes.html

https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001

Speculation robed as explanation, but maybe still good for sake of conversation.

1. It is nearly two decades since the mind-share decimation event of .NET occurred, circa 2002: Visual Basic got a major redesign (VB.NET) that was so dramatic it made any conversion process a major non-trivial matter. C#, along with .NET, was the new shiny, and the adoption of it by a major standards organization (ECMA) certainly made it feel like the safer choice if one wanted to continue usage of Microsoft technology. Evenso, if the staff you had could be fine with either VB.NET or C#, then Java was also on the table, and Java might have felt safer to some, since it had a fine track-record since 1995 and was commonly taught in academia (and there was the potential of it also going to a major standards organization - which then did not happen). The only other option left was to stick-it-out then go-it-alone with the first generation of VB, which ended at version 6, released in 1998. Being early days of .NET, VB6 still was the performance champ (it could be compiled to native code, and integer checks could be disabled), didn't require the huge .NET Framework installation, and at first VB.NET didn't have the Edit-and-Continue feature which VB6 had. So with VB6 one had better speed, productivity, and "easier" installers (stepping aside all the vulgarities of COM/ActiveX).

2. In the meantime, .NET matured, C# matured, and VB.NET matured, and of course Visual Studio (for .NET) matured. Various consultancies emerged offering VB6 conversion services, to C# or VB.NET (or even Angular!). Much of the world has moved on from 32-bit OSs and Windows XP. Anyone still reliant on a VB6 code base knows quite well that they're on borrowed time. But now there are options that are cost-effective enough to warrant the transition. Perhaps during that time employers were still able to find staff that could work with either VB6 or VB.NET (or, perhaps, VBA too?); in which case, for their own staffing situation (and whatever their business model), transitioning the last of their VB6 to VB.NET made perfect sense to them.

3. So, at this point in time, modern Visual Basic (the .NET one) is a powerful line-of-business programming language, and its performance is comparable to C# overall. It may be that .NET is C#'s world, and VB just lives in it, but from the perspective of someone with CRUD and website requirements, VB meets the need.

4. Word on the street is that there's a whole lot more VB6 out there still in production environments around the world than many thought possible. Now that VB.NET is stable and the devil-you-know, and with VB6 transition consultants at the ready, and VB.NET can be used with .NET Core (which makes cross-platform thoughts more thinkable than even when Mono became a thing), and staffing concerns not-so-concerning... Well, even programmers need to eat (and raise kids and pay rent/mortgage), so how bad is it really to do a VB gig, and pay the bills?...

5. Cue the Zombie pronouncements and h8trs. Frankly life is so full of serendipities, I'm not bothering with that. Time will tell if the population of VB programmers grows substantially from the few hundred thousand that Microsoft recognized in 2016. In the heydays of VB6, the count could have been several million. See http://www.devtopics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-visual-basic/, published 2007, for more historical perspective.

6. TIOBE is probably not much use for saying whether language X is somehow more popular than some language Y, but it may still indicate trending interest and usage of X. It would seem that this survey of jobs on dice.com lends some credence to up-ticking trend of VB.NET on TIOBE.

https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Consumer+...

"The class of persons able to buy goods and services other than those that satisfy their basic needs. ..."

apart perhaps from VB but it is going away

Even presuming it's gone zombie, it'll be 30+ years before it might scatter to the winds...

(And that's presuming that VBA is finally no longer a thing.)

In the meantime, some of these kids might someday make a living at maintaining VB codebases.

At about 25 minutes into this, the claim was made that the world was financially stable, currencies were backed by gold, the "real economy" was in balance with amount of money available, until 1971, when the "Nixon Shock" happened. It's somewhat true, but Wikipedia gives a more nuanced story:

- There was the Bretton Woods system (c. 1958) which established a kind of gold standard for currencies; the U.S. dollar was pegged at $35 per ounce, and the U.S. owned over half the world's official gold reserves—574 million ounces at the end of World War II. Foreign governments could exchange their dollars for gold.

- As Germany and Japan recovered, the U.S. share of the world's economic output dropped significantly (from 35% in 1950 to 27% in 1969). The French called the Bretton Woods system "America's exorbitant privilege" - i.e. the U.S. could produce a $100 bill for a few cents, but anyone else would first need to produce $100 worth of goods to get one.

- In February 1965 French President Charles de Gaulle announced an intention to exchange its U.S. dollars for gold. By 1966, non-US central banks held $14 billion, while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserve (with only $3.2 billion available to cover foreign holdings). By 1971, the money supply had increased by 10%.

- In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system. Other nations began to demand redemption of their dollars for gold (e.g. Switzerland redeemed $50 million, France acquired $191 million). On August 5, 1971, the United States Congress released a report recommending devaluation of the dollar. On August 9, 1971, Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.

- On August 15, 1971, Nixon directed that the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets is to be suspended (with certain exceptions) - hence, foreign governments could no longer exchange their dollars for gold (presumably for the time being, at first).

From this lay-person's perspective, an improving economy and a growing population would naturally bring about an increase in the demand for money. Gold isn't as constraining on the supply of money as some folks may insist (there were already too many greenbacks for the gold in reserve by 1966). Everyday working Joes will still need some cash in their pockets to purchase their day-to-day needs, and the more such "Joes" you've got the more money you'll need to put some into the newer pockets. For that reason alone, fractional-reserve banking becomes a thing; at the end of the day, a "Joe" has a more immediate need for food-clothing-shelter than for gold. So long as banking clients collectively have other more pressing desires than that for gold, the "virtual gold" of its ledger books could suffice.

Maybe this is my limitation, but it still looks like "love" means about the same at its core, thru the times - I don't see a "lost meaning" to it. But I do see "flavors" for love, if you will - motivations or contexts for the love. And I accept the point that "not every culture has written about love or valued it in the same way."

Yet the cited article does not indicate "love" as meaning "suffering for someone or something else" or anything like that. Instead, we get something about "tragic love" (an apparent "contradiction in terms"): "In the Middle Ages, the idea that suffering was in some way productive was very widespread."

Earlier in that article: "So what changed in the Middle Ages? 'There was a transformation in culture,’ said Professor Ashe. ‘A series of church reforms in the 12th century took Christianity from a rather austere view of God the Father to a new focus on Christ's humanity. 'The spiritual lives of ordinary people were recognised, and people were encouraged to have a more emotional and personal relationship with God as individuals. And romantic love - giving yourself to another person - provides a justification, in the medieval moral compass, for the pursuit of self-fulfilment as an individual."

And from there, I would argue, "passion" took on a definition of "love" (and not the other way round).

The self-sacrificing love, agape, is what the GP is talking about.

Perhaps, but the GP began with "the word love has lost its meaning throughout the ages". I don't think it has. Perhaps "love" can be parsed into several "flavors" (storge, philia, eros, agape, romantic, loyalty, etc.), but at the core it means still about the same (the "flavors" give hint or detail to motivations/context/obligations for the caring/concern/nurturing/keen-interest).

In the phrase (from above) "truly free persons actively avoid love as in love is a passion", I think here passion means something like "intense emotion". "Passion" has taken on new meanings - barely controllable emotion, intense sexual love, arousing great enthusiasm, etc. Only by way of religious context would a word that meant "suffering" get linked to "charity" love (agape). If anything, its other new meanings seem to be about the kinds of suffering from unsatisfied/unsatiated/frustrated desires.

Could you give a citation for that "love for the ancient and medievals was akin to the word passion"? My understanding of that love-to-passion link is by way of Christianity, i.e. love as the motivation for the suffering (of Jesus). Otherwise, etymology doesn't show/suggest that sort of change in the meaning of "love" (e.g. http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/110566). If anything, there's been a change in the meaning of "passion" (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/passion).

Examples of corporations expressing religious beliefs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/24/he...

Per above: "Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties' argument for not providing emergency contraception and IUD coverage to their employees can be boiled down to this: Because of the religious nature of our companies, we are entitled to religious freedom exemption from the Affordable Care Act's mandate because of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — the same exemption that has been afforded to nonprofits with a religious nature."

Granted, it's the people who run (and presumably own) these corporations that truly have religious beliefs. Even so, from a legal standpoint, it's the corporations that bring suit.

And now, in VBA:

    Sub Main()
    
        Dim i As Integer
        For i = 1 To 100
            Dim f As Integer
            f = IIf(i Mod 3, 0, 1) Or IIf(i Mod 5, 0, 2)
            Dim buf As String
            If f = 0 Then
                buf = Format(i)
            Else
                buf = IIf(f And 1, "fizz", "") + IIf(f And 2, "buzz", "")
            End If
            Debug.Print buf
        Next i
    
    End Sub

I wonder if the world-wide trend on high blood pressure is aligned with that of vitamin D?:

- https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/17956/PDF

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4396645/

- http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691683

- http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/4/1080S.full

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5356990/

See https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/

Yeah, that was an odd start, given that Dr. Downey is a Professor of Computer Science. Even a charitable suggestion that he was looking to keep things as understandable as possible for a wide audience doesn't seem to give much defense.

I think he was trying to articulate how much more expressive/extensive programming languages and libraries (and tools?) have gotten over the years, so that a student can get to do something interesting with much less down-and-dirty arithmetic and arcana.

DOS isn't based on Xenix at all. It's a clone of CP/M, and CP/M was its own thing for 8-bit CPUs (and later 16-bit).

the company started out supplying a Fortran compiler for the Altair 8800

I would suppose maybe at some point they did (not sure on this) but it's long been my understanding that BASIC was their start.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft: Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

According to them the issue is that there are lots of people who are "neither employed nor actively looking for work".

I wonder if we're talking past each other. Perhaps robots aren't the top reason for the apparent worldwide decline in labor participation (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS ). But robots have brought economic dislocation, especially in the manufacturing sector. The worry has been out for a long time on whether displaced workers can find other gainful employment in reasonable time (http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/09/art2full.pdf ). Note this is not about getting merely any job, but a job that can bring a satisfying life. As the automation has grown more capable, so has this concern (https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-happens-to-society-when-robots-... ).

Consider the full quote regarding the "neither employed nor actively looking for work"[1]: It critiques the official unemployment rate as shrouding a dysfunctional employment scene. Gallup says: "The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a big lie."

The usnews article also cites other stats on wage gains, shrinking middle class, growing low-income, etc., all to illustrate its main point: "The Pew study considers a widening wealth gap to be driving the wage growth disparity, as more and more workers find themselves at the extremes of the income spectrum. And this gap is generated in part by the unavailability of what Gallup considers to be good jobs."

This pressure for "good jobs" has brought movements such as raising the minimum wage or implementing universal basic income. Invariably this leads to questions on whether the wages for low-skill jobs should ever exceed their apparent economic worth in the name of a "living wage". From there inevitably robots are brought into the picture (limited, gimmicky, or otherwise), if for no other reason than to suggest that low-skill workers may price themselves out of a job.

Putting it all together - robots on top of widening wealth gap on top of shrinking middle class... - well people worry, you know?

==== [1] The full quote is: Gallup also is among a host of organizations and individuals to criticize some of the government's statistical methodologies in recent years. The national unemployment rate of 5 percent, for example, doesn't keep track of the more than 94 million Americans who are neither employed nor actively looking for work. And while at least some of those not counted in the labor force are either in school or retired, there's also a sizable portion that simply hasn't actively looked for a job in the last four weeks. People who give up looking for employment altogether aren't actually counted as unemployed, even though they may have been without a job longer and in greater need than anyone who's regularly sending resumes out.

Technological unemployment may happen some day. But it hasn't happened yet.

That's the crux of the matter: Whether "some day" happens sooner rather than later. Also, what to do when "some day" comes.

You know it's coming, there's big money and serious effort into making things like Robo-Maid, Robo-Taco-Truck, Robo-laundry-guy, Robo-Driver, etc., a practical reality. We know that Robo-Burger-Maker is rather real today: http://www.eater.com/2016/7/1/12077990/robot-burgers-san-fra....

Your blanket statement regarding on why "valuable work is just not getting done" is overall a side-issue. Welfare may be gaming a system. Disability fraud is certainly criminal. Let's add to that: Living off a pension; Born a "trust-fund baby"; Fully retired on investments. There are plenty of other reasons that certain somebodies do not seek employment income, and perhaps do not have to.

People have good reason to fret about the availability, attainability and retain-ability of gainful employment. There's plenty of history and recent events to make such fretting reasonable (e.g. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/what-happened...).

Could it be that humanity at large is doomed to repeat its usual method of a "reset"? Planet Earth isn't getting any bigger, and if we're lucky worldwide population may plateau around 11 billion. Per Wikipedia, "Global workforce": "As of 2012, the global labor pool consisted of approximately 3 billion workers, around 200 million unemployed." Per The World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS), labor force participation has dropped from a little over 66% in 1990 to barely 64% in 2014. They give a per-country overview of these rates, and also per-income levels:

    High income	60%	60%
    Upper middle income	72%	67%
    Middle income	67%	63%
    Lower middle income	62%	59%
    Low & middle income	68%	64%
    Low income	77%	77%

Take a look at http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/..., which has this byline (June 2012): Strains on the global labor force are becoming painfully evident. Market forces will fail to resolve demand and supply imbalances for tens of millions of skilled and unskilled workers.

As automation becomes ever more adaptive and versatile, it will be interesting to see in what ways human employment may somehow remain economically of interest. But right now the labor force participation trends downward, and the only way that could be good is if the non-participation people are having healthfully happy lifestyles - perhaps as retirees or married to well-to-do spouses.

But if the social order of things is changing such that the prospect of gainful employment becomes less tenable for most, here's to hoping that a better world may yet emerge with minimal strife. Otherwise, it's all too easy to imagine us collectively squabble and fret over moral hazards, free-loaders, and property rights (including the intellectual kind), and that the crisis must first reach a breaking point before any material changes can happen.

If UBI is a non-starter, I've got no ideas other than for maybe getting serious about space travel and colonization.

The "too-long-didn't-read": A Governor on the Federal Reserve Board (Kevin Warsh), is motivated to write this by this week's gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyo., where "the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosts the world’s leading central bankers and academics to consider monetary reform." In it he mostly decries the application of old/current methods directed at raising inflation, in a strategy that is in accordance with the "groupthink within the academic economics guild". He then says via the Dodd-Frank Act the Fed "now micromanages big banks and effectively caps their rate of return."

His essay doesn't convey even the smallest hint of what any alternatives may resemble - only a platitude is offered: "The guild tightens its grip when it should open its mind to new data sources, new analytics, new economic models, new communication strategies, and a new paradigm for policy."

The one clear idea is how "in bed" the Fed is with the financial industry:

(1) "[The Fed] appears in thrall to financial markets, and financial markets are in thrall to the Fed..."

(2) "A new inflation target ... would please the denizens of Wall Street who pine for still-looser Fed policy."

(3) "From the beginning of 2008 to the present, more than half of the increase in the value of the S&P 500 occurred on the day of Federal Open Market Committee decisions."

(4) "Long after the financial crisis, the Fed holds trillions of dollars of assets that would otherwise be in private hands."

(5) "...[I]ts compulsion to keep asset prices elevated..."

In the end, though, the only message that comes loud and clear is "inflation bad", but no mention of the apparent worldwide deflation that brought on the very idea of encouraging inflation per the "groupthink".

Interestingly, Viktor (Victor?) had doctors in his family, such as Georg Klemperer (see https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/...): [He] was a German internist. ... [He was] a son of the Reform rabbi Wilhelm Klemperer and had seven siblings, four sisters and three brothers. His brothers were the writer and literary scholar Victor Klemperer , the physician Felix Klemperer and the lawyer Berthold Klemperer (1871-1931). The conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) was his cousin.

As to Viktor or Victor, this makes me think its the same person: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... . The article there mentions his treatise LTI - notebook of a philologist (LINGUA Tertii Imperii: Language of the Third Reich).

The words "reason" and "explanation" are nearly synonymous. (I went to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary to be certain of this.) If anything, an explanation is built from a set of reasons.

So refurb gave a reason for a bottleneck, and now we need to figure out why providers apparently aren't taking steps that address it.

tldr; :"One widely cited paper by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University found that as many as 47% of Americans work in jobs that will be highly susceptible to automation over the next two decades. But a new working paper by Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory and Ulrich Zierahn of the Centre for European Economic Research paints a slightly brighter picture. ... But the newer study finds that three-quarters of those jobs involve some group work or face-to-face interaction—tasks robot struggle with. Applying a similar analysis to all jobs, they find that only 9%, not 47%, are at high risk of automation. ... And finally, even if the 9% figure is closer to the truth, that still threatens the livelihood of millions. For the poorest quarter of the population, the proportion of jobs at risk rises to 26%, since more of them work in the sort of routine jobs most susceptible to automation."

(Not sure, but I think this is) Their paper: https://www.advisorsandpartners.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/201.... Page 20 suggests that unless your "Income Percentile" is much above 50%, then you're among the (more-or-less) 20% of jobs lost to automation. Get above 75%, then you're sitting pretty.

"It's likely that when we are all working for a living and prospering then we all prosper a little more." Well, of course, we all prosper when we all are prospering. :)

While life isn't exactly a zero-sum game, for certain moments it works that way. In any case, for now (nearly) all of us are Earth-bounded, so the limits of what our planet and our Sun can provide to us (over time) is what truly matters. There's only so much of Earth to go around, and only so much radiation to be received from the Sun. (And I am of course overlooking the occasional changes from meteors and comets and other whatnot from the heavens.)

This thing about income (and wealth) inequality is about more than mere discontents. There are plenty who fear that our global economic system (leaning heavily on capitalism with sprinkles of socialism) will soon arrive at a point of being unsustainable - a point that arrives prior to actual resource depletion.

The heart of it is in the ways that people can be so entitled to things, such as water, food, clothing, shelter, education, offspring, healthcare, etc. The worries are about the consequences of greater portions of the population being at or below subsistence levels. This is especially alarming when the statistics show it growing more significant within "First-World" nations.

The three big factors seem to be (to me, anyway): (1) Strong property rights which enables more rentiers and natural monopolies; (2) Rentiers/Monopolizers out-competing most or all others for political and economic influences and favors; (3) human labor becoming less needed over time due to the growing rise of adaptable and reliable automation.

The automation of item 3 would make a "Galt's Gulch" more tenable, but it would probably be realized as an artificial island nation. Well, one can dream of one, anyway (see http://theweek.com/articles/482427/libertarian-island-billio...).

One can easily google on "wealth inequality" and get some sober/reasonable/academic reads on this. A good primer is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/21/the-t.... Also, look up NBER Working Paper No. 20625.

"...Eventually they need to put money in the hands of investors."

I get your point, and did not mean to oversell "Option 2". But then the shareholders do get to vote on how they'd like it.

BTW, a truer example of "no dividends" is Amazon (http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/dividend-history) - Apple does have a history of dividends (http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/dividend-history), certainly with some regularity since 2012.