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when i google "deadly conflict 1980s" this is the first thing that pops up.

http://www.economist.com/conte...

apparently the 1980s sucked. But you didn't hear about it, because the US "-doesn't care about black people."

We are living in the least deadly period in recorded history, violence by all metrics is dropping per capita.

I don't see nothing terribly out of place in regards to worldwide atrocities... if you're talking about gaza. Keep in mind that the death of 2000 palestinians fell in the middle of a 2 year period involving the deaths of 200,000 syrians.

24 hour news networks need to fill air time, so they pretty much cover anything and everthing like it was 9/11. And the US has never been terribly interested when americans aren't dying. And we didn't really fight anyone in the 80s and 90s.

Solipsism and media bias, bias in recall, and parental protection probably all factor into common misperception.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really."

http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/20...
As soon as we receive a paper, we publish it," after a cursory quality check. Peer review happens after publication, and in the light of day.

http://www.economist.com/news/...
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.

Tax avoidance schemes are remarkably common among large successful coporations. Other successful U.S. tech companies exploit the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" loophole. Ikea pays almost no tax by incorporating in Holland and exploiting its permissive rules for non-profits.

Which raises two questions:

- Are tax rates so high that it is necessary to engage in complicated tax avoidance schemes in western democracies to be successful in business?

- Is it best that companies do avoid taxes? Do we trust Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates to invest efficiently for the betterment of society more than we trust Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? And I would ask the same of the Republican counterparts of those politicians. Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth. I have never understood why, for those who believe wealth is dirty, that its transfer to the political class is somehow purifying.

Obviously, it didn't end for good in 2003.

Controlling the mind is the way to confer dictatorship-like powers while still respecting democracy. Until now, extraordinary communication skills are required in order to screw an entire country. Were mind control available, any idiot could do that. This explains why idiots go after mind control.

Public money is spent to drive research toward empowering the political system rather than some more useful task. Politicians are unable to drive research, of course. The outcome will probably consist of side-products, like the web. So what's the difference between Truthy and, say, teleportation?

hmm... lets see

COBOL.. dead
BSD.. dead
TAPE .. dead

And yet there would be no LHC datacenter without tape.

The CERN Tier-0 in Meyrin currently provides around 45 PetaBytes of data storage on disk and 90 PetaBytes on tape for physics, and includes the majority of the 100,000 processing cores in the CERN Data Centre.

ref:

http://information-technology....
http://www.economist.com/blogs...
http://storageservers.wordpres...
http://scribol.com/science/hal...

Yeah, but then the female employment ratio would fall even lower,

Would it? My experience, at several tech companies, is that the techies prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and would prefer to have more qualified female co-workers. Research has shown that much anti-women discrimination is actually coming from other women. Most female managers will tell you that they have more resistance from female subordinates than males.

I'm not it can't be abused. I simply believe that in this case the hotel are genuinely trying to improve security, and for a very good reason. Perhaps people should delve a little deeper before reaching for conspiracy theories.

Of course, but I think it's no coincidence that it's Starwood who are looking into this technology.

Return on Investment = (Revenue - Costs) / Investments.
Year 1 = (200-100)/500 = 20% ROI
Year 5 = (220-100)/(500+200) = 15% ROI
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. I think you are confusing investments, a balance sheet operation, with costs, an income sheet operation. If I take 700m in cash and buy 700m of cable equipment, gold, land, or government T-bills I haven't accrued any costs. I have moved assets from one part of the balance sheet to another.
Depreciation of assets is another thing. That hits the income statement and is considered to be part of operations. In theory depreciation should match it's usefully life, meaning ROI would be correct. Of course estimations in the real world have issues.
However, in any event, using your methodology, we are back at 26%. Which is standard for cable but fat for most business.
On to AT&T. I have to ask – what competition are you talking about? I grew up with a municipal owned telco. They were a monopoly and they gouged us. Sure, there was AT&T and another municipal owned telco 30 miles away, but they could not offer us any services. There is no reason to think that 100 local monopolizes would be subjected to competitive forces just because there are 100. What broke the market wasn't other monopolizes but new technologies – the cell phone, and latter VOIP.

To your question

If Comcast's cable was really that much more profitable than the rest of their business, why in the world would they not dedicate more of their resources to cable? Simple: Because that's not the case and Comcast knows it.

Let see, the US has 1. Above average costs, 2. Below average speed, and 3. Higher than average profits. So I don't know this.
Let me ask, why would Comcast expand?
Can they expand out into new areas? Nope. All of the markets have been colonized.
Can they expand up by offering better services? This assumes that any costs associated with building better services can be matched raising the prices. Normal firms expand until their marginal costs equal their marginal revenue. They must keep prices low. Not monopolies. They expand until their average cost equals their marginal revenue. Higher prices, lower output, and more profit.

I would recommend reading up on Jean Tirole won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this year for work in this area. Different solutions gets different results. I have not found the perfect article yet, but here is one.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

In some cases, yes it is. And I consider myself a mild liberation.

There are cases of "natural monopolies" where left to itself the market tends to narrow down to a single provided. Look for industries that have high fixed capital costs to start up but low marginal costs after that. Network effects help too. If that is the case, then you often need government regulation to ensure a well-functioning market. Now, what type of regulation is complex.

Jean Tirole won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this year for his work. Different types of solutions get you different types of answers.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

I would be o.k. if the city owned the last mile, much in the same way they own the last mile of sewer and water lines.

The US government never owned the entire world in the first place.

That attitude is the single biggest reason there are terrorists.

The reason why Islamic terrorists have been attacking India for decades is "because USA"?

Actually, the British partition of India that is largely responsible for much of the strife in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Similar conclusions can be reached concerning the Allied (primarily British) carve-up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, with respect to the fractious nature of nation-states in the Middle-East as well, if one deigns to read a little history.

Probably part of it - legalized abortion also likely played a role. Changes in policing also likely played a role. As with most things, multifactor.

http://www.economist.com/blogs...

Can you cite something that is 1. Not a vague content free preview of a future article and 2. Not behind a paywall?
Here is mine.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

The Economist has a great article on free-routing. Not only does this save time & fuel, but a "continuous descent approach" is also quieter at airports.

Great link here. It's a shell game complicated enough to make a mollusk blush.

I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years), and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025.

Here is a old article, from 2009, but I found it helpful.

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

It was also a plot point for the Big Bank Theory - season 6 - where Lenord goes off in a ship in find such things.

The Economist this week has a special report about how automation is going to make a lot of us unemployed, possibly in more permanent ways than previous industrial revolutions:

http://www.economist.com/news/...

http://www.economist.com/news/...

• The tax haven in the heart of Britain
• City banks ‘cheat’ Europe in €600m tax avoidance trading scheme
• How Tax Havens Stole Your Money
• The Missing $20 Trillion

So who is selling when he is buying? Wouldn't he constantly be behind the curve? Paying too much for the stock and selling for too little?

You are touching on one of the great debates. Momentum trading is one of those anomalies that should not work in theory but does in practice. Why? Ideas have been kicked around for the last 20 years. Here is a link to a possible explanation.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

I guess the question that springs to mind is whether that covers ALL network costs, including the high voltage lines from the power station to the sub station. I'm also wondering whether the rural nature of your area doesn't provide a degree of latency and resilience that may be more absent in an urban environment. But I'm guessing there. But yes, you do make an interesting point; thanks.

I guess the other question about costings is about baseload; the issues are spelt out here:

http://www.economist.com/news/...

not quite sure how that translates to the western side of the Pond.

As the Economist notes, due to German and other European solar government incentives, European utilities face an existential threat to their investment future and business model. Utility giants the world over have seen this and decided to fight back against Net Metering and other means whereby homeowners can feed back into the electric grid excess energy production from rooftop solar. Barclays, the British multinational banking giant, agrees that rooftop solar and net metering represent a threat to centralized electric production utilities.

The problem utilities face is that solar tends to maximize output at mid-afternoon, exactly the same time spot prices have traditionally been at maximum. So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.

OK, time for me to get on a soapbox. I think this is shortsighted. The real problem here is that government and electric utilities have agreed on a price structure and investment plan to build out gas powered and coal powered plants that now appear to be unsustainable due to disruptive shifts in the market from technical innovation in the renewable field. As is noted in TFA, solar is - or will soon be - already cost competitive even without government subsidy.

Market fundamentalists would argue, 'let the utilities die. Their investors bought into a dying technology, the market will decide their fate.' Except that they have an endless stream of money to buy lobbyists and legislators to warp law in their favor. Further, they have a good argument that intermittent renewables will only meet partial demand. You still need baseline generation capacity from central utilities. So the problem - from their perspective - is excess production by renewables.

Except: when has excess energy production ever been a problem?

The real problem is twofold: We want to move off of fossil fuels due to global climate change and they want to maximize their vast infrastructure investments. A real policy solution would meet both needs.

Rooftop solar should be maximized. During periods of excess, gas powered plants should funnel their energy to local raw materials ore processing facilities and manufacturing. This has the benefit of distributing labor where it's needed near mining sites, rather than shipping raw materials where labor is cheapest for exploitation as well. And it keeps utilities running for the next thirty years to generate a viable expected ROI. And government policymakers could then plan a rational transition period away from fossil fuels without the economic dislocation of utility giants imploding worldwide.

Thoughts?

The financial collapse was a result of mistakes, not crimes.

Absolutely false.

-> In America there have been just a handful of criminal charges brought against senior executives of banks, and even fewer successful convictions. This is very different from the response of prosecutors in earlier banking crises, such as the meltdown of Savings & Loans institutions in America in the 1980s. In that case more than 1,000 bankers were convicted for their misdeeds.

-> William K. Black [senior regulator who pursued offenders during the savings and loan crisis] tells Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL that the tool at the very center of mortgage collapse, creating triple-A rated bonds out of "liars' loans" — loans issued without verifying income, assets or employment — was a fraud, and the banks knew it. And while there is no law against liars' loans, Black points out that there are, "many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent. [...] They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud. "

-> Winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2010, The Inside Job chronicles the fraud behavior which led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession.

The key word is "control fraud."

A vital detail that those outside the city (and many within it) don't know - and of course won't get from the inflammatory OMG! NANNY STATE! headline/summary - is that the City of Seattle doesn't have a local landfill. Hasn't for many years; there's no nearby space. Instead, all garbage is loaded onto train cars - hundreds of them a day - and sent by rail to a landfill in rural Oregon, about 250 miles away. That was the cheapest alternative for the city, even though it involves paying twice (once to transport it, and again to the landfill operator). But it's still expensive. Given that it's in the best interest of the City _and_ its ratepayers to reduce the amount of landfillable waste (aka number of train cars) in favor of more economic alternatives; specifically, recycling and composting, both of which are able to be handled within a few dozen miles of the city, at much lower cost than the landfill trains. The alternative is to have even more and longer trains and higher rates for garbage for everyone. Kind of the opposite of a nanny state; this is pure and simple economics. If the spectre of a few $1 fines for the few residents who can't be bothered to separate their greasy pizza boxes into another bin makes everyone's garbage rates lower, then I'm all for it.

Thats BS. Seattle has no landfill because it doesn't want one. Not because there is no space. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_City_Light
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/...
http://www.economist.com/node/...
(from 2007) http://seattletimes.com/.../20...
(2012) http://your.kingcounty.gov/sol...
OP is referencing this: http://www.seattle.gov/finance...
That's the problem: wastefull goverment mismanagement when they could make a deal with those nearby.

"THE American way of life is not up for negotiation." That was the stance struck by the elder George Bush at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

While I think it is inaccurate to equate the two parties on environmental policy, I think this quote from Bush 41 best summarizes what we Americans as a whole really think about the environment: it's nice to have around for postcards and stuff, and ought to be the beneficiary of a few feel-good measures, so long as they're painless - but anything that costs real money or jobs is simply inconceivable. Any President who asks us to sacrifice for the future will simply be playing Carter to the inevitable Reagan who will come along to tell us that nothing we could ever do is bad, and everything will work to the greater good so long as we simply help ourselves and feel great about it. And that man will win the next election, in a landslide, every time.

A big picture, fact based view... in case anyone is interested.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

The whole thing seems like a clever scheme by Chinese companies and Goldman Sachs to sucker money out of U.S. investors.

It is. What do you really own with Alibaba? The websites? No.

What's really for sale: When investors buy Alibaba, they are actually purchasing shares in a Cayman Islands entity called Alibaba Group Holding Limited.

But that company -- surprise! -- doesn't actually own Alibaba. Instead, Ma and another co-founder, Simon Xie, own most of Alibaba's biggest businesses according to Chinese law. Ma and Xie are then under contract to turn profits over to the Cayman entity.

The arrangement is called a variable interest entity (VIE), and is necessary to get around China's strict foreign investment rules. But investors should be aware of the structure -- especially since Chinese courts have not clarified the legality of the arrangement.

Voting rights and control in the company? No.

So what the fuck do you actually own? Hope and promises. My ex-wife gave me those.

P.S. Even the Hong Kong stock exchange spurned Alibaba.

CBC's article is just a Canadian take on things. The original article (just as scary) is here:

Well, yes. But it's hardly "original" -- this is a problem that has been profiled extensively for years, yet few people seem to realize how far it extends. A couple of times over the past year, when posters on Slashdot mentioned random forfeitures that happened to them, they were met with comments saying, "You must have done something suspicious" or "What's the rest of the story," and I tried to provide links to point out the systemic problem, but have been met with ignorance and resistance.

For a sample of past coverage, here's an extensive piece from The New Yorker a year ago, a piece from Reason in 2012, a piece from Forbes in 2011, pieces in Slate and The Economist from 2010, a detailed piece on NPR from 2008, etc., etc., etc. Here's an extensive account of problems with the system from PBS almost 15 years ago (around the time that legal reform forced money to go to local municipalities in many cases rather than the federal government). The ACLU has been fighting this for decades.

I know some people here may be well aware of this problem, and others may find this shocking and new. Regardless, it's very sad that it may take other countries' shaming us into taking action to fix an unjust assault on our citizens that has been going on for many years.

I think the term you are looking for is 'civil law', not 'letter of the law'. US legal system at the federal level is heavily influenced by common law, as it is in most states. States which cover areas originally colonized by France or Spain have a tradition of civil law.

https://www.law.berkeley.edu/l...
http://www.economist.com/blogs...

The history of common law in the US is why you'll hear in trial coverage or in shows like law & order, lawyers will use precedents when raising their objections or filing motions. This is usually called 'case law', as it is law which hasn't been written by the legislature, but which has come into common practice as a result of a judge interpreting a written law and setting a precedent. If subsequent judges agree to that ruling, eventually it because sort the way things are, until the Supreme Court weighs in, or the legislature spells it out (in a statute).

Notice: it was science that led to finding out they were wrong and the retraction.

Yes, but it was also common sense. The journal published something that was demonstrably false. A newspaper that was given bad information from a source doesn't need "science" or some sort of formal scientific review to publish a retraction saying the source was wrong.

People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.

Actually, not really. Sure, in an ideal world this is true, but not necessarily in the "normal scientific process" as practiced.

Research grants are awarded, publications are selected, tenure is granted, etc. mostly on the basis of NEW research, not on checking up on other people's results (which is generally not considered notable unless previous results were wrong, hard to get grant money for, and hard to publish).

We have a systemic bias against replicating research in the way a lot of modern science operates. It would be better if what you said was true more often. But paper retractions are exceedingly rare, even if much (if not most) published research has serious flaws.

There are some relatively recent serious efforts to fix this, though. But it's a misrepresentation to say that checking research is part of the "normal scientific process" -- it only tends to happen in high-profile articles or ones that make extraordinary claims. For most run-of-the-mill research, it's definitely not as common as it probably should be.

Yes, because in the U.S. you'd never have for-profit prisons, civil forfeiture, or even outright cops stealing cash under the pretence of fighting crime.

The U.S. certainly wouldn't have issues with police beating minorities or killing them, leading to riots. They wouldn't have a growing number of cases of false imprisonment, or police militarization

While the "419 scam" is associated with Nigeria, many of the scammers are not actually Nigerian. The Economist published an article about why. For the scammers, a major cost is leads that turn out to not be credulous enough to actually send money. So many non-Nigerian scammers claim to be Nigerian, figuring that Nigeria's reputation for corruption and crime will weed out all but the stupidest respondents.

This CC/ID should help with the corruption and crime. It is easy for a corrupt official to take a bribe in cash, but much harder with a CC. Likewise, a thief wants to steal cash, not a pre-paid CC without knowing the PIN. It will also make collecting taxes easier. In poor countries, pervasive tax evasion means not enough money for infrastructure, or to pay sufficient salaries to government employees so that they work for their salary rather the opportunity to extort bribes. A broader tax base will also pull more people into the formal economy, rather than low productivity work in subsistence farming or running small street stalls.

Damn! If only he had bankrupt an energy conglomerate, dissolved hundred of millions of dollars in pension funds, and legally embezzled 9 figures into personal accounts! He'd have received no punishment at all!

The fall-out from Enron

Instead of potentially dangerous experiments, may I suggest the oldest known and proven solution to global warming?

This is extremely complicated, so please bear with me for a minute or two:

Plant. More. Trees.

Don't believe me? Fine, don't take my word for it. Heck, even that bastion of free enterprise, The Economist got behind that idea!

So, why is not implemented on a large scale? Because planting trees is not techonologically "sexy" - it is well known, has been well known for centuries, and, for maximum effect, would require rich countries to invest serious money in poorer countries, to save the rainforest (which is where tree-planting would have maximum impact). And we cannot allow these natives to get money to do something as simple as plant a tree, right?

In other words, the wealthiest have decided it is a lot more fun to throw money at dangerous or even foolish and ineffectual solutions rather than provide for jobs and development in the poorest countries of the world -- precisely the countries that will suffer the most due to global warming. Make of that what you will.

Not any more: this year the state is looking forward to a surplus of $4.2 billion.

The Panama Canal - by virtue of being the only alternative to a trip around the tip of South America - can charge passage fees just less than the cost of a trip around South America. Consequently they make a huge profit margin off of operating it. A quick google search says it brings in about $2 billion/yr, but only costs about $600 million/yr to operate. So they've got a massive 233% profit margin.

Add a second canal, and suddenly they're not competing with a trip around South America. They're competing with each other. Unless they collude together to fix the prices so that they're essentially the same (divide traffic 50/50, which might actually be a good thing since I hear wait times at the Panama Canal can be a week or more), the price is going to drop to slightly higher than what it costs them to operate the more expensive canal. That is the nature of competition. e.g. If the profit margin drops to a still-high 50%, profit from the current level of traffic would be just $300m/yr, and it'll take them 167 years to recoup the $50b construction cost even if they were able to borrow that $50b interest-free. Since the Panama Canal is essentially paid for, the Nicaraguan canal would probably have higher costs and thus slimmer margins, and will likely take centuries to pay for its construction.

A Nicaraguan canal would have the advantage of allowing passage of larger-than-Panamax ships (ships designed so their width barely fits through the Panama Canal). But again, if they try to charge significantly more for such ships, operators will simply continue building Panamax ships. Any surcharge they add on has to be less than the money operators would save by using larger-than-Panamax ships. (Significantly more since such ships would have to be built in the first place.)

It'll be great for the rest of the world - cheaper transport costs, more capacity, faster travel. But could end up tanking both the Nicaraguan and Panamanian economies.

Take for example, in Kenya the M-Pesa, the leading form of mobile payment system is widely adopted and mobile phones are used to pay for things such as public transport, school fees, rent, money transfers, to get loans etc. It is so successful that it was launched in other countries like Tanzania, Afghanistan and India.

And M-Pesa is private owned, not a government project.

Oh, and M-Pesa is apparently now going into the digital currency market proper by integrating with bitcoin.

There is no reason why Ecuador cannot do the same.

This sort of thing is why shares of russian companies trade at a huge discount compared to shares of western and asian companies.

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

It may seem like hubris, but the fact is, it's not. Look at this: http://xkcd.com/1338/

The preponderant majority of land mammals in the world, by weight, are either humans or food for humans. For vegetation, the picture is not much more encouraging: all of the world's wild forests weight less and cover way less land than our agriculture does.

There was a whole special report in the economist about the idea that we are now in a different, man-made geological era, the "anthropocene": http://www.economist.com/node/...

No, its not opinion. Its accepted observations of economic reality.

You are not going to find any meaninfull study concerning it because the economy is more complex than a single point of input.

It takes a special kind of hubris to describe your own view as "accepted observations of economic reality", when it not only has no factual documented support but also is not how some fairly knowledgeable economic institutions and economists, like IMF and OECD see it ("the IMF and the OECD both now reckon that minimum wages do little harm and may do some good", Source: The Economist.) and some former formidable opponents of minimum wage have turned around and changed their mind on the topic lately (same article), including the magazine The Economist itself.

You are of course free to disagree with all of these, and if you had data to support it I would actually be interested, but that doesn't make your opinion a fact.

And btw, of course you can do studies on individual factors in a complex system, this is done all the time, in fact most of modern science and economic studies are like this. You might also arrive at complex conclusions, but this is not the same as having no studies and no documented effects.

Sweden has school choice. Fact.

Doesn't make it libertarian. Fact.

Having a choice doesn't make something libertarian. Fact.

Libertarianism having choice does not mean anything else with choice is automatically libertarian. Fact.

Trying to say Sweden's system is libertarian simply because it has choice is like trying to say

http://www.economist.com/news/...

"The system, introduced 20 years ago, allows parents to choose between municipal schools and independent schools, all financed by tax money. The aim was to increase quality by competition, but it has also led to the best students flocking to the same schools."

So here you are, arguing that STATE FUNDED schools, both municipal AND independent, are libertarian because they have choice.

You do not have a clue what you are talking about. Fact.

You have a poor grasp of logic, as evidenced by your apparent failure to understand the non-exclusivity of properties of things. Fact.

You tried to argue that the choice of state funded independent schools is a libertarian system. Fact. And you say *I* don't have a clue. Good job buddy. Showing everyone that libertarianism is a pipe dream that can only work with government backing. You don't really want government money to go away. You just don't want to pay for it but are happy to take the benefits of it.

US isn't seeing any of the benefits (yet) because it's a massive power that can borrow and print money willy-nilly, and the currency is mostly under control at the moment. But not all countries are like that. There are countries where something like Bitcoin can be a viable alternative to official currency, like Argentina. Bitcoin is flawed, but it guards against certain attacks that can be performed to a currency, in a way that is sometimes useful.

On the other hand, the way Dell accepts Bitcoin doesn't bear a lot of risk; a third-party accepts Bitcoin for them and pay them in cash, and absorbs fluctuation risk in return for some fees. It relies on customers bearing the risks themselves. It isn't a big step for Bitcoin; it is only a very small step towards forming a sufficient number of nodes of a skeleton that may or may not turn into an actual ecosystem that eventually circulates Bitcoin. But isn't a terrible decision for Dell either.

This starts happening already. They get some of their billing outsourced to India and some of it done by machines. The linked article is 4yo now. I guess the billing is as painful as it always was but part of the profits are siphoned out of the system to few guys that own legal rights. Now if they automate and offshore the plumbers that would mean revolution. It will happen eventually.

. . . but, as "The Economist" pointed out, are they safe from being eaten by dogs there . . . ? The IRS scandal: A dog ate my e-mails http://www.economist.com/news/...

On the serious side of things, wouldn't it be better for some independent organization archive government emails? I mean, the Nixon administration investigating the Nixon administration should have taught us something. If an organization separate from the IRS archived the emails, the IRS wouldn't have to say their disks crashed. The independent organization lost them, and we could believe them. With the IRS losing their own emails . . . well, that has a bit of a stench to it.

Knowing that the NSA, IRS or whoever could not simply erase their own tracks of illegal activities would restore more confidence in the US government.

And more showing what parasites the red states are on society.

He's not: "As Stephen Breyer, one of the Supreme Court justices, said in this week’s hearing, “What disturbs me is I don’t understand what the decision for you or against you is going to do to all kinds of other technologies.”

It seems to me that judges should be ruling based on the law, not perceived ancillary social influences. That's why we have three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. Legislative makes the law, and judicial merely determines if actions are legal or not legal? Quaint, no?

Really? Look at the French economy, I certainly don't see a useful model there to aspire to.

Try Germany instead; they appear to work fewer hours than the French, and I have the impression the German economy's doing fairly well.

Great article, excerpt:

"The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher."

There's also a telling graph showing the relationship between hours worked and productivity.

Try Germany instead; they appear to work fewer hours than the French, and I have the impression the German economy's doing fairly well.

Yes, but the Americans are just as big self-centered a**holes as the French, in cultural terms, so they would wind up like France anyway.

Really? Look at the French economy, I certainly don't see a useful model there to aspire to.

Try Germany instead; they appear to work fewer hours than the French, and I have the impression the German economy's doing fairly well.