Slashdot Mirror

The Economist had an interesting breakdown of an iPhone's manufacture. It actually looks like the U.S., Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are the biggest beneficiaries from the iPhone's manufacture. Well, aside from Apple itself that is. Foxconn's slice of the iPhone pie is minuscule.

You'd be very popular in these places, all of which could produce more food on their own if government was not taxing and subsidizing and regulating food in the world:

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especially painful for the poor

I bet it would get pretty personal for you if you came to these places and started spouting your socialist views on how cheap food is that your government is subsidizing farmers and then paying farmers to destroy it

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especiall

Software, algorithms, and business methods should never be patentable. It violates the original intent of patents for real inventions by claiming the machine-or-transformation test applies just because it runs on hardware like a computer.

And it is a real problem for the future of not only America, but for the rest of the world, as noted in this recent article in the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/intellectual-property

Patents should be rare, and only awarded for tangible objects. And even then, only for their unique implementation. Edison and Tesla both invented light bulbs. Both are valid and necessary for progress. No one should have a monopoly on light bulbs in general, or products, or markets for that matter.

Because invention itself is almost always evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Incremental improvements of ideas, and the next idea borrows from previous ideas. We all stand on shoulders of giants.

Hopefully, Google will jump on the boat with the folks at The Economist who argue that the U.S. patent system as it stands should be abolished.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Just a clarification. John Koza wrote the possibly expired patent code. Their also seems to be a lot of interest in patents recently as witnessed in this Economist article and story on Planet Money. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/intellectual-property?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/patentsagainstprosperity

According to Lexington at the Economist, this whole hoopla was the Republican's fault.

the Republican House has come up with is a non-solution (since the Senate cannot buy it) to a problem entirely of the Republicans' own making. The reason for this crisis is that instead of just raising the debt ceiling in the customary way so that the government can pay the bills Congress has already run up, the Republicans decided to point a pistol at the American economy and threaten to pull the trigger if they did not get the spending cuts they wanted.

Also, I think it was horribly hypocritical of the Republicans to blame "entitlement programs" for the problems and never mentioning the wars and their action of lowering taxes during war time - that's what killed us. All the other reasons like Obama Care are just distractions - especially when you consider that it hasn't even taken effect yet. And why is SS on the table in this context? Bullshit!

Yes eventually Social Security will have to be addressed but to include it in the debt ceiling was ludicrous.

By the way, the debt ceiling allow the government to pay it's current bills and nothing more. Thinking that it allows for increasing government spending just shows how little we Americans truly understand how our government operates - myself included.

I largely agree with you except the premise that it was unavoidable. The thing with machines, unlike humans, is that they can be shipped from one area (country) to the next. Aside shipping, they won't have to think about moving, get compensation for moving, have wives and kids in a school they like.

So while, in the 1970s/1980s, if we fully automated, it may have slowed down the move to China, I'm not sure it would have stopped it. In the past, factories located where the existing resources were close (steel mills in PA/Ohio and the like since it had coal for energy) and as well as the skilled labor lived. If you take the labor portion out of the equation, it makes moving that much easier. But, China having lacked infrastructure at the time, I do see your point as plausible. But it still didn't mean they couldn't move to Canada/Mexico/etcetera.

What I do see is the factory era is largely over. What brings jobs locally will be the "last mile". You still need electricians/painters/contractors to make use of the product pushed out by the factories. While Germany weathered China extremely well (it got taken over only a few years ago by China as world's largest exporter), it still has a magnificient apprenticeship system.

Apprenticeships are usually these last mile jobs. While America is all over the college system, it doesn't recognize that most people simply aren't cut out for academic/engineering jobs nor is that even desirable to pigeonhole them into it.

http://www.economist.com/node/18929361?story_id=18929361&fsrc=rss

One thing I should note, I would say because of apprenticeships, you have a lot more skill in skilled labor in Germany. Another plus. Plus, they don't get into their 20s impoverished through "education".

Until humanoid robots that can do housework/contracting come onto the scene, it's one area here we Americans should really consider. Hands on education aka apprenticeships, that the employer provides (there are still certification processes) vs. theoretical training in colleges for 2/3 of the populace.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

If you're just interested in keeping up in general, then you need good news sources. I like The Economist's science section ( http://www.economist.com/science-technology ), and Slashdot. Just by reading those, you'll never miss any major developments.
You can also watch the occasional TED lecture ( http://www.ted.com/index.php ).

It's been found that people who've undergone Botox treatement are less empathic than people who haven't.

I would suggest that rich and narcissistic people are already less empathic than ordinary people. The UC Berkley found that in general rich people are more selfish than poor people, and it takes a lot of disposable income to be able to afford Botox treatments. People who undergo Botox are also often doing so because they are concerned about their fading youthful appearance, a sign of narcissism, and narcissistic people are by definition more self-absorbed than others.

So how could a study of Botox recipients prove anything other than selfish, self-absorbed people are less empathic than others?

The Big Mac Index.

The Wikipedia article on the same subject goes into a bit more detail.

You know, I've heard that story many times. It comes up every time the Gates Foundation is mentioned on /. But I have yet to see an actual reputable citation supporting the claim that this supposed requirement actually exists. The Gates Foundation Wikipedia article doesn't mention it under its "Criticism" section. I looked at the Economist articles on the Gates Foundation and don't see the article you describe. The closest thing I could find was this article in the L.A. times, which criticizes some of the Gates Foundation's investments.

The only stuff I can find on the Gates Foundation and IP at all seems to indicate that their only concern with IP is with the rights of the local researchers that they give grants (they generally are required to publicly publish their results). And nowhere have I seen any mention of a requirement that a country that gets a grant has to sign the WIPO treaty (or any other treaty).

To be sure, Republicans claim the Treasury can just "prioritise" interest payments to avoid a default. Read the meticulous analysis that Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center did of the Treasuryâ(TM)s cash flows in August for a sense of how risky that is. Among his findings:

        For example, on Aug. 3, we project that the government will have about $12 billion in receipts and $32 billion in committed payments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. And Aug. 15 presents a triple threat: a $19 billion daily deficit, a $29 billion interest payment and a quarterly refunding auction to pay off a maturing $27 billion bond.

Even assuming that Treasury manages to remain current on its debt, the firestorm that arises when vendors, pensioners and soldiers stop getting paid will be unprecedented. As the nonpartisan analysts at ISI Group note, the failure of TARP to pass on the first try in the fall of 2008 may not do justice. The main fallout then was the plunge in the stock market. This time, it will not be just financial market turmoil but âoevoter outrage associated with the prospect of an immediate 44% cut in federal spending that would instantaneously overwhelm the Capitol Hill switch boardâ. Both parties will be blamed, but Republicans more. After all, some, such as Michele Bachmann, have opposed raising the ceiling precisely to induce cuts on such a scale.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/06/republicans-and-debt-ceiling

So just stopping spending isn't that simple, and if you do manage to do it without defaulting on debt payments, you'll disrupt many lives.

Given that every other reputable economist from the left to the right has said exactly the same thing.

I'm not an economist myself but my understanding is that US debt is used as a fundamental, secure collateral for many (most?) other financial transactions; reducing confidence in US debt reduces confidence in the underpinnings of huge swaths of the economy.

Add to that the fact that interest rates on new US debt will rise (including debt that is rolled over), raising borrowing costs for the us government considerably.

http://www.economist.com/node/18866851

http://www.economist.com/node/18928600

Given that every other reputable economist from the left to the right has said exactly the same thing.

I'm not an economist myself but my understanding is that US debt is used as a fundamental, secure collateral for many (most?) other financial transactions; reducing confidence in US debt reduces confidence in the underpinnings of huge swaths of the economy.

Add to that the fact that interest rates on new US debt will rise (including debt that is rolled over), raising borrowing costs for the us government considerably.

http://www.economist.com/node/18866851

http://www.economist.com/node/18928600

Most of the posts will probably be "yeah MBAs don't contribute anything" versus "engineers are geeks who can't communicate". In reality MBAs working for companies usually know what the company does in detail, and there are plenty of engineers who can communicate.

It's still an issue though, because the opportunity cost of learning about "business" is less learning about something else. According to this article,

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

The rise of MBAs is also tied to the rise of finance. Most people agree that the US funneled too many resources into the finance sector, which then just destroyed them. Instead of designing more complicated mortgage securities, those physicists could have been doing physics. Although "managing" doesn't necessarily have to be about finance, most business schools spent a lot of time teaching their students about CAPM and Black-Scholes. (If you don't know what these mean, good for you!)

But of course business schools are not a fixed target. Most have reacted to the financial crisis and are now, for instance, emphasizing globalization and how to work in multiple countries. Time will tell I guess if this path is any better.

Personally, I think the biggest damage is done by the outlook that most MBA programs teach. Instead of thinking that your company's goal is to build the best vacuum or whatever, you learn that the goal is to maximize shareholder value, and that gaming the system is what everyone is doing. Over the long run, countries probably don't want too many of those people in charge.

Nathan Deal, Georgia’s governor, who signed the immigration bill into law, came up with a novel solution on Tuesday: give the jobs—of which there are around 11,000, according to farmers who responded to a survey by Georgia’s agriculture department—to unemployed probationers. How that will work in practice remains unclear. Nobody can force farmers to hire felons. And people on probation must seek work but can decline job offers, such as those requiring hard physical labour in the sweltering midsummer. As for the departing workers, Bryan Tolar, who heads the Georgia Agribusiness Council, says, “I don’t know if they were legal. All I know is they were working.”

Incidentally, I support legalization and taxation of soft drugs

What's the difference between soft drugs and hard drugs? Is alcohol a soft drug (because it's regularly consumed by people at all levels of society) or a hard drug (because it is ranked by experts as being more harmful than any other drug)?

Surely the solution is to regulate the supply of all substances, rather than the current two-tier market split between regulated supply of tobacco and alcohol and the effectively unregulated market run by large criminal organisations. Some good ideas are here: http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blueprint%20download.htm

Now, he went to jail for six months for drug possession but also the very large sum of money. They were able to prove that he was a dealer and was en route to make more purchases. If he had had BitCoins, he merely would have kept a wallet on his phone then transferred the cash to the woman and could have denied the whole transaction had taken place and was clueless about the shrooms in his car.

I think there are several misconceptions in this statement.

The first is that having or moving a large amount of cash is somehow wrong or illegal. Some governments have tried to make it so, eg with border controls, but fundamentally this is not evidence of anything and the Supreme Court has struck down convictions based on these laws. Generally you should be careful with drawing conclusions about AML related things because the relevant laws are very vague.

The second is that doing such a trade with Bitcoin would give plausible deniability. No, if the woman was working with the police, she could just give them the address she was going to use to receive the payment beforehand, and after the trade the block chain would contain evidence of payment to that address. They could then use the contents of the dealers wallet as proof he paid her.

Corporate embezzlement becomes easier, drug dealing becomes easier, funding terrorism becomes easier, etc.

Again, I think this is a common misconception, albiet an understandable one because it is frequently spread by governments. The reality is that prosecutions under money laundering laws are rare, and when they occur they almost always occur in tandem with some other crime (as by definition, money laundering is attempting to hide the proceeds of crime). The idea that these laws help the fight against terrorism is especially absurd as modern terrorism is not an especially expensive thing and thus attempting to spot terrorists by their financial activity is always going to be chasing a needle in a field of haystacks. For just one example, take a look at the official UK government guidance on how money services businesses should spot terrorists (page 45):

6.9.4 Examples of activity that might suggest to staff that there could be potential terrorist activity
The customer is unable to satisfactorily explain the source of income.

Frequent address changes.

Media reports on suspected or arrested terrorists or groups.

.... and that's it. Yes, merely changing your address frequently and not being able to 'satisfy' some random front-line staff member at a bank is potentially enough to trigger a suspicious activity report (SAR) indicating you might be a terrorist. Needless to say, the volume of SARs in some countries is so high that the police are barely able to process them at all.

In short, having done much research on this lately, the case for AML laws saving us from drug dealers and terrorists needs to be really well laid out, given how draconian they are (some practically establish a financial police state). Yet there's little such evidence. The Economist called time on this state of affairs years ago, but I doubt they will change anytime soon. The "War On Terror" always takes precedence over other things, unfortunately.

You keep saying this but you fail to provide any details on how this will be done. When transactions are anonymous, how in the hell does this happen?

Your understanding is wrong. Bitcoin allows for good privacy (but not as good as cash), if you want it. Exchanges, being private businesses like any other, are free to demand whatever identity proofs they want, and as KYC laws require them to do so, I believe all the big ones do. Mt Gox

A close-to-complete social map, for example, should be fairly doable to construct, just from observing who calls eachothers or send SMS to eachothers, you can even assign fairly accurate weights to the relationships based on frequency of call/sms and frequency and duration of being in the same spots.

Not "should be possible", "is happening."

I can tell you for certain this is taking place and they are collecting and already using this data to try and make more money. One of the things they look for is for who are the "influencers." For example, they have noted that certain people send short text messages and make short outgoing calls, but often get many responses that are much longer. Think of someone who just says "sup?" and 10 people respond with big stories about their day or offers to hang out, etc.

These people are often offered discounted phones or given excellent customer service or some other such special treatment. Mostly without ever even knowing.

The Economist has an excellent article on it all: http://www.economist.com/node/16910031

The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies, not just techies.

Have you visited the Bitcoin forums? Quite a few economists there. Also, high profile magazines, such as The Economist, have written about it from the point of view that Bitcoin is, in the very least, a highly interesting experiment. No mention of any built-in economic failures there.

I don't understand the knee-jerk reaction that everyone here gets each time Bitcoin is mentioned. Almost every time it's accompanied misconceptions about USD being backed or otherwise thinking that something which is currently valuable (such as gold) is somehow guaranteed to always be that way.

No, I don't have anything invested in Bitcoins, and I wouldn't want to store much value in it until it has stood the test of time, and the implementations are more robust. I was shocked when I found out the private keys are stored locally in an unencryped file - that's a f***ing travesty.

But I do find the concept fascinating.

Nassim Taleb talked about this in a podcast with The Economist a while ago (this is a link to the story that went along with it: http://www.economist.com/node/17509373), where his point was that books would likely be around more or less forever - they're technology that has been around for hundreds of years. Compare that to something like the Kindle (and such) which have been around for a much shorter period of time. His point was that betting against very established, proven technologies due to a very short period of success from a new/shiny technology isn't always a great plan.

(Or at least that's how I remember his interview without re-listening to it.)

Take a look at this article from the economist:

http://www.economist.com/node/18805862 The argument is that wages are rising in china, and no other place has the same combination of cheap and abundant labor and good infrastructure. This, together with inflationary pressure from raising energy costs and food costs might bring the end of the era of cheap goods.

Except that people use the roads and airports in the US and other countries.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/02/high-speed_rail_china
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983104576262330447308782.html

"Tickets for high-speed trains can be twice as expensive as the highest-class tickets on regular-speed trains. A high-speed rail ticket between eastern China's Wuhan and Guangzhou, for example, costs 469 yuan, or about $70. That is prohibitively expensive for many Chinese, and has resulted in at least some trains operating almost empty, industry experts say."

FOIA exists for a reason and that reason is not to make flippant and pointless enquiries.

There are already plenty of threats to rescind or curtail FOIA inthe UK and nonsense like this, which wastes time and money, will only lend credence to those calls.

In other words: wise up.

Maybe I can put your mind to rest.

The housing industry is not even a blip on the radar. Fertile land is used for agriculture. Did you know that the majority of trees in the world are cultivated?

The economist recently did a report on how we are going to be able to feed the world's growing population (or not). Here is a link to the main article: http://www.economist.com/node/18200618. And here is another one: http://www.economist.com/node/18200678. But there were many other articles on specific subjects.

The take-away lessons I got from reading all that, was that we have a very limited supply of non-used, fertile land, mostly concentrated in places like brazil where recent technological advances have made previously useless land viable. Water is the other bottleneck. And the expansion of meat-eating habits is also a problem, because it requires more land and more water per person than a vegetarian diet. So yes, your hamburger puts more pressure on the forests than the lumber industry.

The housing industry is not even a blip on the radar. Fertile land is used for agriculture. Did you know that the majority of trees in the world are cultivated?

The economist recently did a report on how we are going to be able to feed the world's growing population (or not). Here is a link to the main article: http://www.economist.com/node/18200618. And here is another one: http://www.economist.com/node/18200678. But there were many other articles on specific subjects.

The take-away lessons I got from reading all that, was that we have a very limited supply of non-used, fertile land, mostly concentrated in places like brazil where recent technological advances have made previously useless land viable. Water is the other bottleneck. And the expansion of meat-eating habits is also a problem, because it requires more land and more water per person than a vegetarian diet. So yes, your hamburger puts more pressure on the forests than the lumber industry.

> Referring to him as Mr. is an insult to him and probably motivated on some level by racism.

You'd better inform The Economist of that fact, then. Everyone, regardless of class or creed, is referred to as <prefix>.<surname> in that rather respected organ.

You can start with this article about Mr Reagan.

Don't let reality get in the way of your Apple hate.

http://www.economist.com/node/17309237

"Since 2006 the number of mobile-phone-related patent complaints has increased by 20% annually, according to Lex Machina, a firm that keeps a database of intellectual-property spats in America."

The first iPhone was unveiled by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007.

So the mobile patent wars started before Apple showed up, Apple just added another litigation happy company with a ton of patents and money to the mix.

Ha! The potholes, the bridge collapses, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Economist, and pretty much anyone that has ever seen a road in the United States, knows that that America's transit infrastructure, it's roads, it's mass transit, everything is shit. Yes, it was once the envy of the world, but that sixty years ago.

While it is true that roads are paid for with gas an vehicle taxes and fees, the amount of revenue being generated under the current regime is demonstrably insufficient, and has been for decades. After 30 years of repeated tax cuts, with increased demand for basic services, we do have a self-imposed revenue problem.

Google started using the word App in 2006 for Google Apps (well before the Apple trademark application in 2008).

App was a buzzword in 2002 for Microsoft 95/98 application development.

Numerous references exist for making an "app" in various perl and php forums around 2000.

A killer app for computer chat published in the Economist in 1999.

Article titled "The Killer App" published in the Harvard Business Review in 1998

App Launcher software patcher circa 1998.

"DOS App" used on uunet in 1994...

And that is just from a few minutes of googling...

Apple did not invent the term "App" as a word.

The French Socialist Party gets its best shot in 22 years of winning the Presidency and overthrowing a strongly pro-American regime. But a year before the election, their leading candidate, a guy with no criminal record in his 62 years who is leading by double digits in all the polls, suddenly decides to rape a maid in New York. That's quite a convenient coincidence for the United States and their friend Nicolas Sarkozy, no? That's right up their in convenience with Julian Assange deciding to become a serial rapist just a few weeks after leaking troves of secret U.S. State Department and Pentagon documents.

Isn't it nice when all your enemies decide to become rapists after they cross you?

People, in their Internet-aholism, seem to care less and less about their privacy. Are we regressing on some level?

But what's even more amazing is that this seemingly endless source of revenue makes people think it actually enhances their lives, whereas the added value to their lives is doubtful, at best.

The Economist talks about the new tech bubble: http://www.economist.com/node/18681576, and this time, it seems like it's here to stay. All these new "technologies" look like they have something in common: depriving people of their freedom (the so-called "cloud", social networks, increasingly intrusive search engines...)

Will I eventually be proved wrong? I hope so.

The US has a freight rail system that is the envy of Europe. (Europe is ahead in passenger rail, but that loses money.) Intermodal traffic (containers) is way up over the last decade, and profitable. There's new rail construction going on, and rails and locomotives have been upgraded in recent years.

Modern large locomotives use what are essentially giant computer-controlled servomotors to drive the wheels, so that all the wheels on all the locomotives stay in sync and share the load equally, which means they can all be torqued up to just below where they start to slip. This means fewer locomotives per train, little or no wheel slip, and the ability to coordinate many locomotives spread throughout a train.

Last year, Union Pacific ran a train 3.5 miles long from Los Angeles to Denver. Average freight train length in the US is now 6500 feet and climbing. That replaces a lot of trucks. Since Los Angeles built a no-grade-crossing rail connection to the port there, far fewer trucks are moving to the port.

Europe still has a lot of little 2-axle freight cars. Those disappeared from US trackage some time before World War Two, replaced by the standard big four-axle cars still used today. The bigger cars are also stronger, with a consistent minimum coupler strength, which means longer trains are possible.

Mixing high speed passenger trains and freight on the same track cuts severely into freight capacity. Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.

You necessarily don't need lots of rare earth elements to make an electric car. Sure, when Toyota was designing the Prius in the mid 1990s, they chose to go with rare-earth magnets in their motors because they were the latest, fanciest, lightest magnets you could buy. On the other hand, Tesla Motors (and other companies) in the 2000s took a more cautious direction and built their propulsion motors without permanent magnets, therefore using no rare-earth elements there (the power windows probably still have rare-earth magnets, just like in every other modern car). Instead, Tesla Motors went back to the induction motor, originally invented by, you guessed it, Nikola Tesla in 1888. Rare earth problem solved.

References: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/induction_motors

Incidentally, the poll on your link indicates what I expected. The public is no longer terrified of nuclear power. When you boil it down, things like Fukushima are just relatively dangerous industrial accidents. It's good to see some perspective finally appear on this.

I think they have some plans but all of them are subject of a revision due to the fact that it is very difficult to know what happened in the first place. See here for quite interesting details on the subject.

I thought once let them suckers sleep in the facility once a month that should teach them. Now I think straight execution after the accident of all management levels except the bookkeepers as they have to control payment of damages should commence. There is no way people can learn (see here) so let them pay at least.

I agree that children deserve more equal state support, but the evidence for "the increasing gap between rich and poor globally" is mixed. See The Economist: Global economic inequality: More or less equal?

See this Economist article for a more wider perspective on 3d printing and the impact it will have on the manufacturing industry

It is true that countries like Zimbabwe and Zaire have basically banned GMO crops, but South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso are encouraging the use of the technology.

In South Africa, GMO corn farmers realise more than 15 tonnes per hectare compared to three tonnes per hectare of organic corn. 90% of South Arfican white corn is GMO. Monsanto has recently secured cultivation approvals in South Africa for MON89034 (YieldGard II with enhanced insect resistance) and MON89034 x NK603 (stacked trait with insect & herbicide resistance).

From The Economist: "More than three-quarters of the soyabeans grown around the world are now genetically modified, as is roughly half the cotton and over a quarter of the maize (corn). Crucially, developing countries now account for nearly half of the world's 134m hectares of transgenic crops, with Brazil, Argentina, India and China in the vanguard (see chart). Of the 14m or so farmers now benefiting from the technology, perhaps 90% live in poor countries."

"I see no indication that any high speed rail systems in the US would carry freight."

Moreover, the US has one of the world's best freight rail systems, and trying to mix high-speed rail and low-speed freight on the same tracks could be a disaster, see America's system of rail freight is the worldâ(TM)s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it.

Oops... here's a non-paywall'ed article about the tyranny of choice.

The question is: is Apple still taking more than 50% of the revenues of the smartphone market with less than 5% marketshare, as they were a few months ago? This story becomes interesting when Android starts taking significant revenue, although I doubt any individual manufacturer will be as profitable as Apple is at the moment.

I will counter you citations with these:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469
Sorry, there is no social mobility in America anymore.

And, I mean I'm sorry, but did you even look at those graphs? You can move around the bottom ninety percent all you want, it doesn't even matter. You are a peon if you aren't in the top one percent. And there is no way short of a miracle you or I are getting into the club that owns ninety percent of the wealth in this country. We're all fighting over table scraps.

Yes, they are the same people (or their direct descendants) who were there before. There is more social mobility in France than in the US. On average, it takes five generations for a poor family to become middle class. On average, children of the wealthy stay wealthy, children of the middle class stay middle class (or slip to poor) and children of the poor stay that way. The American Dream of a true meritocracy is a lie. You are like the prisoner Brian meets in the Roman Prison, in Life of Brian, who lauds the Romans while hanging upside down from his feet. A fair day's pay for a fair day's work, indeed.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469

The problem with you "alternative" energy types is that you have no sense of proportion. You could entirely cover the Sahara (according to a British study) in photovoltaic cells and still not cover Europe's energy needs.

Citation requested.

Here's my own: A Solar Grand Plan. Another one, Hooked on Subsidies. Yet, another one, The elusive negawatt. Still another: Renewable Energy Maps of Nevada. Also Renewable Energy for America.

That isn't to say we shouldn't move to more alternative fuels (we should), but to naively think that will be sufficient is just blind.

To say alternative energy can't be sufficient is just blind. Requiring people to pay the full cost of the energy they use, including but not only eliminating subsidies and paying for pollution, then people won't be as wasteful.

Falcon

Can you say geothermal? Like nuclear power plants geothermal power plants generate steam which turns turbines. So, pro-nuke hysteria just means more nuclear power plants are built causing more pollution. However more powerful is the negawatt. Every watt not needed is one less watt that has to be generated. And the negawatt pays off faster than any energy source.

Falcon