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Unless you're Orin Hatch

I don't think you'd get much argument from either side of the isle.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) that kook did this:

He was the chief author of a federal law enacted 17 years ago that allows companies to make general health claims about their products, but exempts them from federal reviews of their safety or effectiveness before they go to market.

.

That fucker is the one - like all republicans - only cares about corporate profits and theirs and fuck the people.

The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:

Yes, that's an excellent followup to this Gary Taubes piece published in the NYT in 2002, which covers most of that same ground and a lot more besides.

Also, it is NOT science.

Adams used to think that eating fat would make you fat not because the science said so, but because he trusted the government, and the government said the science said so. But the government knew that this was not the case, and pushed a high-carb, low-fat diet on The People anyway. Sadly, there is no smoking gun which proves who fired the shot, but since this is a capitalism you can simply follow the money. Who profited? Big Pharma, Big Health, and the Processed Foods Industry. One or more of those groups applied the bribe money. I'll bet money.

Meanwhile, some of the official advice is still good and applicable, like go out and get some exercise, you troglodytes. But on the other hand, if you're counting on the USDA nutrient content of foods database to tell you how eating something is going to impact you, you should be aware that caloric measurements are derived by setting food on fire. That's inherently bullshit.

Sony's bread and butter isn't electronics though; it is insurance !?

* http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05...

While they made some pretty bone headed decisions in the past, i.e. flooding the market with too many TV's that consumers don't give a crap about, pouring billions of R&D into the PS3, and have never really recovered from Apple envy, they are slowly turning the Titanic around.

When a company is so big that they end up suing themselves they aren't going to disappear overnight.

The summary (though not the article) begins on the assumption that professors make big bucks. That may have been true at one point, but it's certainly not true now. Yes, full-time tenure track faculty average close to six figures annually, but only 27% of university instructors are full-time or tenure-tracked[1]. The remaining 73% or so is made up of adjunct faculty, who typically earn somewhere between $20-25k annually[2]. So, the idea that the sharing economy is going to be able to massively bring down educational costs by putting market pressure on faculty salaries doesn't really hold up. That market pressure was already there, and faculty salaries are already in the toilet. I'm not sure salaries can go down further without those teachers exiting the market entirely.

It's probably also worth mentioning, the vast majority of traditional (and non-traditional) students don't really go to an educational institute just to learn (though, it would be nice if they were to learn too). Students usually go to those institutions for a recognized credential or degree. Even if you're obtaining excellent instruction from the Internet, you're not going to get that degree. The real scarcity isn't teachers at the university level (as demonstrated by super-low wages for adjuncts). The real thing that keeps prices up is the artificial monopoly created by accreditation systems.

And, that might not entirely be a bad thing. Four year universities usually try to create well-rounded students, who learn much more than they'd ever need in their personal career. Students often complain about having to take classes they don't care about, but being broadly educated does seem to make individuals more open minded to solutions to problems that are not necessarily within their usual field of vision. If students could pick and choose their own courses, they'd rarely get that broad-view approach.

In short: this new app might be fine, but it won't revolutionize higher education in any meaningful fashion.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01...
[2] http://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/...

Loads of schools have bought and are buying iPads without much of an idea of what they're going to use them for, let alone a coherent educational plan. The end result? Expensive, distracting toys that have little, if any, demonstrable effects on learning outcomes in K-12 education. Then there's stories like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01... Developmental psychologists are less than enamoured of shiny, techy internet gadgets in classrooms and children's pockets.

Jails in many cities in California now require you to pay for your stay

At least if you don't like the accommodations, you can pay a little extra for an upgrade.

Not to mention that every team, and every quarterback, has a bunch of things they do to the balls to get the feel of it the way the QB likes it. See, for instance, this article about how the Giants rub down and otherwise fiddle with the balls. It is possible the Patriots do something to the covering of the balls that is still within regulation but causes them to leak pressure. Possibly even knowingly. That still meets the rules, at least until the owners change them again.

The ideal gas law is apparently unfit for the circumstances: NY Times, Jan. 29: Deflation Experiments...

Kind of embarrassing for the physicists who went out there and qouted the ideal gas law or even based calculations on it. Names please NYT!!!

Nice work Tom Healy, Carnegie Mellon grad/engineer.

This job is better suited to engineering than physics anyway. No new or deep physical understanding is needed.

Only a fame whore physicist would go out and (condescendingly and yet mistakenly) explain the physics with Tom Friedman-like babyish analogies to kids running in a room. And it would take some nerve to name check the all but completely ruled out string theory in a bid for popular physics cred.

Ball inflation has been tuned by several teams/qb's openly, usually within regulation limits, so it's likely they already knew about inflated balls deflating in lower temps before it was found out. Most people who graduate college have at least some experience with thermo either in physics or chemistry, so NFL football players can be expected to know this. But it would give them a nice alibi when they can go running to physics to back them up and claim it was a total accident, claim ignorance, innocence, etc. And then when everyone is debating physics, the real story fades away in the mix.

If they refuse to play by the same rules,

Uber is doing background checks on drivers - at least as well as cab companies. Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?

That's what they claim but the facts don't support that. If anyone is making it by political favors, it's Uber. In California, Colorado and Illinois, they got themselves exempted from the taxi background checks by hiring lobbying firms and lobbying legislators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny
By MIKE ISAAC
DEC. 9, 2014
Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.”
Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information.
Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches,
In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks.
(Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n...
Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars?
How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates.
By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros
Friday, May 2, 2014
Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver....
On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan.
"I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver."
His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes.
What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.
"I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore."
NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers.
Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct.
Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco.
And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI.
Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers."
Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immediately disqualif

Methods are here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

Those are the results, not the methodology and order in which the the questions were asked. There's a link in the article but it's wrong.

Here: http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

"Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores," the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

Just noticed this relevant article today too, about how poorly-communicated and -understood relatively simple information regarding non-contentious medical advice, like "take aspirin to reduce risk of heart attack'.

Using the above as an example, if 2000 people took aspirin daily for 2 years, it's estimated that in that population there would be 4 heart attacks instead of 5. The benefit may be clear and proven, but is it reasonably communicated how minuscule that actual benefit is?

Exactly this.

What's funny is that when Climate Change Skeptics, the Koch Brothers, funded their own study and planted an outspoken critic of climate change science as the director of the research, that skeptic ended up becoming a believer and published an Op-Ed in the NYT explaining how wrong he had been to not accept the science.

But somehow people still find a way to rationalize it all away as just the invention of a bunch of wealthy limousine-riding scientists keeping down those poor, defenseless oil companies.

Apple routes US profits through offices in US states with favorable tax regimes (e.g. Nevada). In Europe they route them through Ireland.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

Braeburn Capital, an Apple subsidiary in Reno, Nev., manages and invests the company’s cash. Nevada has a corporate tax rate of zero, as opposed to the 8.84 percent levied in California, where Apple has its headquarters.

Though unlikely to change your opinion, Krugman has an interesting piece on how they're not so radical after all, but pretty much following textbook macro. Don't like Krugman? Well, he predicted the economic quagmire that we're in now. Bill Gross was so off he got kicked out of his own firm.

If you're reactionary, everything pretty much looks like radicalism,

Will the EFF be the ones who apologize to the families of those killed by attacks that could have been stopped?

Really? Do tell. What are these attacks that have been stopped by mass surveillance and could not have been stopped by good old-fashioned detective work?

Terror attacks are rare in the United States. They are remarkable precisely because they are rare. This is why anti-terrorism powers are overwhelmingly used to investigate non-terrorism offences, and the vast majority of terrorist attacks foiled are ones that they made up.

We have mind control not by government, but by the money behind the scenes. Get ready for more of this.

When companies can "effectively" just "buy laws" (and/or Politicians) corruption knows no bounds for price gouging.

Not just companies. The political network overseen by the Koch brothers is getting ready to spend $900 Million on the 2016 elections.

Now the Kochs’ network will embark on its largest drive ever to influence legislation and campaigns across the country, leveraging Republican control of Congress and the party’s dominance of state Capitols to push for deregulation, tax cuts and smaller government.

On May 22, 1886 .. Zenas F. Wilber, a former Washington patent examiner, swore in an affidavit that he'd been bribed by an attorney for Alexander Graham Bell to award Bell the patent for the telephone over a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, who'd filed a patent document on the same day as Bell in 1876.

But read on...

His October 21, 1885 affidavit directly contradicts this story and Wilber claims it was ''given at the request of the Bell company by Mr. Swan, of its counsel'' and he was ''duped to sign it'' while drunk and depressed. However, Wilber's April 8, 1886, affidavit was also sworn to and signed before Thomas W. Swan. These conflicting affidavits discredited Wilber.

Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy

There were 600 lawsuits over Bell's patent, none successful, and a bad smell about the business from the start.

Others also laid claim to inventing versions of the telephone, including a Mr. Rogers, manager of the Pan-Electric Telephone Company. Rogers distributed his company's stock to members of Congress, including Senator Garland, (soon to become Attorney General) in the unstated hope of favorable treatment. If the Bell patent were to be invalidated, the Rogers patent and the Pan-Electric stock could become very valuable.

On This Day - February 13, 1886

buying is only better when it is. http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

buying a median priced house where I live would leave me with a lower net worth after 10-15 years than renting.

Perhaps your google skills are better than mine. I keep finding articles like these:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The quotes in those articles support the scenario above. Am I missing something?

If you give a speech to a group of people, and find out later that a portion of the audience were also members of an unpopular group, then acknowledging that you gave the speech, and accepting that you should have looked into the group a little closer, is not the same thing as admitting to being on center stage in a white hood yourself.

Do you get that distinction?

I haven't been following this in detail, and I personally don't give a shit if this guy was a card carrying Klansman or just some dude that didn't bother vetting a group that wanted to hear his speech on a topic that he was passionate about. What I do care about is people making unsubstantiated claims, and so far I haven't been able to find anything else.

So, if you have something more, please let me know, and I'll shut up. Otherwise, perhaps you should ask yourself why you are so willing to make this leap of faith.

Nasa forgot to mention the error bars

Yes - they were cleverly hidden and directly addressed in the press call when the record was announced. Only the cleverest of deniers could have possibly found it hiding in plain site and released during the announcement. Only the cleverest denier could claim another of these years was hottest: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/i...

Tell me clever, clever bloke. Which of those years is hottest?

skeptics start their trend-lines at the height of the '98 peak to manufacture a negative trend. Which skeptics were doing that?

No skeptic, clearly. But this guy sure was: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Hadcrut4 shows no warming for 17 years

What - starting from 1998? But no one does that! Anyway - easily shown to be wrong: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/h...

UAH for 18 years

Now I know you can use woodfortrees.org so you must know this is also wrong: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/u...

Hadcrut3 for 20 years

Wrong again! http://woodfortrees.org/plot/h...

RSS for 22 years

Now I am starting to see a trend.... WRONG! http://woodfortrees.org/plot/r...

260 cases last year in Pakistan and that because the medical teams are being attacked hence have to be rescued. No information on whether or not all 260 cases a: were vaccinated or b: resulted in fatalities. 21 cases in Afghanistan last year which were attributed to Pakistani refugees, and six isolated cases in Nigeria. Source: NYTimes [not paywalled].

Inquiry Into I.R.S. Lapses Shows No Links to White House

Now piss off.

benefited enough people

It has hurt enough people that it is not suicide.

Citation seriously needed - from a reputable source. On balance, if you investigate this honestly, I suspect you'll find that the ACA has helped more than it has hurt. Sure, some people have had to pay higher premiums, but it is almost always for better coverage, and many people complaining didn't have any insurance, but now have coverage - especially people needing Medicaid. Ironically, people in Red states have benefited more than those in Blue states.

Here's a citation: Is the Affordable Care Act Working?, from 10/2014, quoting:

1. Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced?
   Answer: Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.
2. Has insurance under the law been affordable?
   Answer: For many, yes, but not for all.
3. Did the Affordable Care Act improve health outcomes?
   Answer: Data remains sparse except for one group, the young.
4. Will the online exchanges work better this year than last?
   Answer: Most experts expect they will, but they will be tested by new challenges.
5. Has the health care industry been helped or hurt by the law?
   Answer: The law mostly helped, by providing new paying patients and insurance customers.
6. How has the expansion of Medicaid fared?
   Answer: Twenty-three states have opposed expansion, though several of them are reconsidering.
7. Has the law contributed to a slowdown in health care spending?
   Answer: Perhaps, but mainly around the edges.

They're talking about the Heritage Foundation's 1989 proposal, later supported by Orrin Hatch in 1993, revised again in 1994.

Also available at less truthy sources in more detail.

Sadly the relevant research shows that while you would like this to be the case, it isn't.

If you'd like to know more, look at the defcon conference videos for the last few years.

Just as a for example, I'll direct you to this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...

There was also a talk this last year that went into the architectural design of the car's network, and showed that in most cases there was no device between the head end unit and the sensitive items in a car, and where there was it wasn't a security device, merely a signal management unit, and the presenter expected to be able to jump it. But again, typically if you get access to the bus, you can talk to anything you want. There was also a lovely bonus bit where they showed you could update the to an arbitrary unsigned firmware due to some sloppiness in the process. (if you cut the power at the right time, the recovery process didn't do the appropriate checks. Once they got in and could analyze the python scripts being used, they discovered if you wrote a specific character (I think D but my memory could be playing tricks on me) to the right sector of the CD, it would bypass the signature checks and just update the firmware.

Engineers are generally smart, but they also tend to design to the specifications. If you don't TELL them to consider an attacker in their designs, they don't.

Min

Hmmm . . . a "no - go" zone for Muslims. Interesting. Since their are 791 no go zones for non-muslims throughout the country, the nation turns tables.

Aren't we being stupid today.

So the Postal service is still the most secure legally protected method for sending data. Just mail CDs.

The USPS scans all mail
The USPS monitors mail on behalf of the feds without any authorization.
What's to stop them from opening it without a warrant? Sorry but the whole system is controlled and abused by your favorite government officials.

Sidenote: CDs were replaced by DVDs and now Blu Rays. Just fyi if you want to send more than 700mb of crap.

Very misleading for people to conclude from this headline that diapers somehow pose a risk of "brain swelling" for babies! I found a New York Times article about the process the researchers used. It requires a sequence of steps that begins with a tissue sample. The scientists "infuse" the tissue with the chemical **building blocks** of the polymer (not the polymer), making sure they evenly permeate the sample. The polymer forms inside the tissue (destructively chopping it up in the process at the chemical level), and then they add water causing the polymer to swell. The polymer itself does not ever cross the cell barrier, and it can't. That is why they inject the chemical building blocks. This is not something that can happen by touching or ingesting the polymer itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

http://www.verisi.com/resource...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ch...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Chattanooga lost their credit rating did to overwhelming debt from their government broadband attempt

No. This, at least, is unsubstantiated FUD.

From Forbes.com:

In fact, contrary to Stephenson’s claims that municipal broadband hurt municipal credit ratings, S&P just upgraded the Chattanooga public utility’s bond rating, stating, “The system is providing reliable information to the electric utility on outages, losses and usage, which helps reduce the electric system’s costs.”

A quick google search of Chattanooga and broadband turned up multiple articles agreeing that their local internet deployment has been a roaring success, particularly in bringing a new wave of business and revenue to the city.

Not every city is successful, but that's no reason for states to prohibit them from trying, if nothing else to give the monopolists an incentive to improve their crappy race-to-the-bottom service.

So, lemme get this straight.

A drug company CEO is blaming manufacturing companies in third world countries (which the big drug companies use to cut costs) for having shoddy practices. This hand wringing goes so far as "I wish they'd clean up their act." But then stops, of course, because it's not OUR fault - it's those people over in India and China that are to blame.

It's not like we hire them (or, in some cases, employ them as wholly owned subsidiaries), so we're in an excellent position to dictate policy (and ENFORCE policy) for them. Nope. It's all their fault. Nothing to do with us at all.

This is Apple putting the blame on Foxconn for unconscionable conditions in their manufacturing plants. Or western garment companies who contract their manufacturing to Bangladesh shaking their heads at Tazreen.

Shame on those other people in countries we choose to do work in because of lax regulation and cheap unskilled labor for having poor regulation and lacking skilled quality control people! It's all their fault.

A drug company CEO taking this position, but not accepting any blame, disgusts me.

Poor controls mean that antibiotics are leaking out and getting into drinking water. They are in the fish and cattle that we eat, and global travel and exports mean bacteria are traveling.

And those fish, cattle and even people are getting those antibiotics for *free* - seriously impacting our bottom line and tight-fisted control over drugs that, in reality, don't really cost as much as we say they do to research and manufacture, but we sell for a metric fuck-ton of cash.

According to this NY Times article, $2.6 Billion to Develop a Drug? New Estimate Makes Questionable Assumptions are an "estimate that drug companies could have made more money if they used their research investment for things other than drug development."

In both of these announcements, a significant amount of the costs to develop the drugs were opportunity, or time, costs. They are the returns that might be expected, but that investors went without, while a drug was in development. When a drug company invests in research and development, it is tying up money that could otherwise be invested elsewhere. In this announcement, the Tufts Center says that $1.2 billion of the $2.6 billion is time costs.

The end of the article notes:

In 2010, a systematic review of studies that looked at the cost of drug development was published in Health Policy. The review found 13 articles, with estimates ranging from $161 million to $1.8 billion (in 2009 dollars). Obviously, methodology matters.

That's a far cry from $2.6 Billion.

It appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.

Perhaps the women felt more comfortable and/or were allowed to speak more w/o interruption when there were more women on the team. From the NY Times article Speaking While Female (Why Women Stay Quiet at Work):

Almost every time they started to speak, they were interrupted or shot down before finishing their pitch. When one had a good idea, a male writer would jump in and run with it before she could complete her thought.

Sadly, their experience is not unusual.

Suspecting that powerful women stayed quiet because they feared a backlash, Professor Brescoll looked deeper. She asked professional men and women to evaluate the competence of chief executives who voiced their opinions more or less frequently. Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.

Instead of relying on policies/laws to keep email confidential, I wonder if the internet would be a much safer place if the laws said that any unencrypted email has no expectation of privacy.

Unencrypted email should be thought of as more like a post-card -- where governments routinely scan them all for law enforcement.

If you want anything private in email, encrypt it.

And if it were widely thought of that way, corporations would insist on encrypted emails, so the email client vendors would make encryption easy instead of the pain in the neck it is today.

There are studies that show that women are less likely to speak up when outnumbered by men. So if the most successful teams were ones where everyone contributed equally, it seems like those groups would tend to either have more women so that women are more willing to speak up, or no women at all (assuming that men are all likely to contribute in that environment).

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/2...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

That's bullshit. Obese people have pretty much the same metabolism as skinny people. It's not your "metabolism" that makes you obese, it's how much and what you eat.

No, it really is quite dependent on biology. There are numerous studies on twins that clearly show that it's governed by far more than just calories in == calories out. http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~p... , http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05...

If you look at the data, many countries in Europe and Asia are merely a few years behind the US when it comes to obesity:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes....

So, don't get too smug about this. Whatever "the problem" is, it's likely the same problem wherever you come from.

... there's this issue with blasphemy and/or images of the Prophet. According to this NY Times article Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy by Mustafa Akyol, there is actually *no* prohibition in the Quran and such things were only added later as part of Shariah Law, by people wanting control:

The only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably is the Quran. And, conspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept. Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision or a ban on fine arts.

Tellingly, severe punishments for blasphemy and apostasy appeared when increasingly despotic Muslim empires needed to find a religious justification to eliminate political opponents.

In addition, Muslim extremists seem selective in their outrage:

The Quran praises other prophets — such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus — and even tells Muslims to “make no distinction” between these messengers of God. Yet for some reason, Islamist extremists seem to obsess only about the Prophet Muhammad.

Even more curiously, mockery of God — what one would expect to see as the most outrageous blasphemy — seems to have escaped their attention as well.

Finally, the action *actually* recommended by the Quran is simply: Do not sit with them ...

Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah, though, the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: “God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”

Just “do not sit with them” — that is the response the Quran suggests for mockery. Not violence. Not even censorship.

Dare I say it, the NY Times has a much better graphic.

immunity from disclosing - The Haliburton Loophole Courtesy of Dick Cheney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

People who claim ownership of the natural resources (including land underneath buildings) or of financial assets used to capitalize businesses may never have done any more work than cozy up to some King hundreds of years ago to get a "grant" of land, or, alternatively, (legally?) bribe some politician to get special monopoly or tax preferences, or something similar. Those "rents" can form a substantial part of many costs, and have little to do with "labor". Just think "feudalism" and "serfs" for an analogy, where feudal lords (who often provide nothing but protection against the feudal lord himself) taking much of the harvest from "their" lands for themselves despite however much work the "serfs" put in.

Also, even when up-front costs to consumers may be lower with cheaper labor (domestic or foreign), there are also social costs (like violence, failed families, welfare costs, etc.) such as shown by so many people who work at Walmart getting food stamps etc.. So, there can be a lot of indirect costs to "cheap labor" that are paid in indirect ways like higher taxes or greater fears of violence and so on.

Another example of externalities as indirect costs is low price for gasoline at the pump may ignore the huge taxes and debt obligations incurred to support a huge USA war machine which (in theory) defends long oil supply lines, and it also may ignore costs like polluted ground water from MTBE, or the health and crime crises caused by lead in gasoline in previous decades. It is possible the the cost of leaded gas may be (in my estimate) many trillions and trillions of dollars, which people never paid at the pump but paid in their personal lives and in taxes to pay for prisons and police:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
"New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "

Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks. On that, see Alan Greenspan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10...
"âoeThose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholdersâ(TM) equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,â he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform."

...leave your old ideas behind when you come back. Here in Texas we have a booming economy with lots of jobs.

So will you also be willing to leave your own "old ideas" behind if the Texas boom doesn't last?

There's a more important point: in additional to all of those things you list, computers already control cars, at least most of the ones made in the past several years. Some (most?) of those have remote access. Some of those have remote exploits that allow remote control of the brakes. This isn't sensationalism; this is published research (note that control of steering was not demonstrated, presumably due to the attacked car not actually having computer-controlled steering, although some do). These attacks, importantly, have nothing to do with autonomous cars. That part is just fear mongering.

According to one of the key decision makers at the time (Steve Jobs), the US lost manufacturing precisely because we lack STEM degrees. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01...