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Not that I personally find that a good thing, but I'm sure the NSA would.

No they wouldn't, in fact, my NSA friend was just telling me how false claims of moles among their ranks were bogging down their operations something fierce by causing frivolous witch hunts. I'm pretty sure they don't think claims of non-existent security holes are a good thing -- OH, you mean AGAINST North Korea? Silly, that's the CIA's job -- which the FBI is salivating over now that they're incorporating NSA intel in all their ops. What's funny is the inter-agency "intelligence" war, which if they actually had intelligence wouldn't be waged.

Truth be known, NSA certainly does have the capability to spy on NK, or anyone with a network attached computer. It's called, Ferret Canon, and any script kiddie with enough money to purchase metasploit-ready zero-day exploits on the black market can have the same capability too.

But if you want to know what would be funny is if those idiotic "cyberwarriors" following the point-and-click flow-charts at the NSA to deploy the automated attack systems actually didn't realize how easy it is to put exploits in the data on one's own computer, so that when the spies open the images/videos/documents they ex-filtrated one can open a back-door into their systems. Or, in other words, it would be hilarious if Getting Hacked was part of their plan...

It' isn't funny or smart that the Sony "hack" was done by insdiers, and yet your news media is blatantly lying to you, despite security researchers blowing that NK angle out of the water long ago. The scripts used had hardcoded file paths. The leakers knew the IT infrastructure of Sony intimately, it wasn't an outside job. Sony laid off over 5,000 employees, including their entire digital division prior to the "hack", and after the 1st wave of fires there was plenty of time for some disgruntled IT folks to see the writing on the walls and plan for some pay-back if they got fired. All those folks got fired as bonus for finishing up their jobs, and the leak was retaliation.

After the media speculated about the NK retaliation angle, the state propagandists jumped on board and the FBI report "Made it so". So, now we have some undisclosed NK "IP address" as the reason why we "know" it was NK, as well as "We hacked them once too, so there" from the NSA -- Which sounds a lot more like a clean-up job and posturing needed after the media sensationalism backfired when media scaremongers started saying, "We Lost the Cyber War against NK". "Nuht, uh, we didn't lose, we had already won, see!?" NSA, please. You're just collecting info in a big convenient single point of failure; If a shitty contractor like Snowden can get all that dirt, actual enemy spies have even more access -- Making the NSA the biggest threat to national security. NOW THAT IS FUNNY!

And I would rather not die.

If you live in the USofA, you are in more danger of being killed by someone in your family than by a terrorist.

If you live in the USA, you are in more danger of being killed by your TV or furniture falling on you than by a terrorist. (24 fatalities per year vs 17 per year).

When we were at war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, I could see temporarily giving up some of our freedoms for security. But to give them up in perpetuity for something as trivial as terrorism? If you believe that's a worthwhile tradeoff, then the terrorists have truly won. The whole reason terrorists use terrorist tactics is because they don't have enough manpower or firepower to mount a head-on attack, or even a guerrilla attack. They deliberately choose a tactic which has maximum impact on public sentiment (i.e. terrorizes them, hence the name) for minimal effort. 9/11 was a fluke, a statistical outlier, whose tactic was already rendered impossible to replicate by the time the people on the 4th plane realized what was happening.

In the grand scheme of things, terrorists are nothing, less than a roundoff error in our vehicle accident fatality statistics. Would you accept government monitoring of your everyday driving behavior for added safety? Why not? Nearly 2500x as many Americans are killed in car accidents each year than by terrorism. Shouldn't that be making your "would rather not die" alarm go off like crazy?

One thing I've noticed about Space Nutters is that they're overwhelmingly software programmer types. In other words, they really don't know anything about physical reality. They assume that progress in Field A automatically means the same progress in Fields B, C, and D.

They've spent their entire lives gobbling up sci-fi TV, novels, and hanging out with like-minded comic book fans, and spent their time speculating about various doomsday scenarios, sometimes stretching into the billions of years into the future.

Completely ignoring the fact that evolution is still happening, and therefore no matter what there won't BE a human race in a far shorter time interval than that!

In other words, they have far more in common with a religion, complete with its doomsday scenario, its criteria for good and bad behavior, and its Promised Land (which apparently is anything but land).

Pay enough attention, you'll see the same tired old clichés and hackneyed fallacious "arguments" trotted out with monotonous regularity.

They squeal like vampires in sunlight when you try to understand the origins of their religion.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

And facts don't get in their way.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

And the more grandiose and improbable their fantasy, the stronger the belief.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's a jejune, failed philosophy from an earlier, naive era and should be buried along with steam locomotives, corsets, and buggy whips.

There are changes when you have kids, I suspect women change more than men:
http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...
http://www.livescience.com/363...
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...

The other thing is men can have kids at an older age, and many of these "brilliant" ones don't have kids till later if at all. If women wait till later to have children, many of them end up not being fertile enough or have problems finding a mate (coz more males prefer the prettier younger more fertile ones, while females seem fine with higher status older and uglier males).

The correct technology for education is thousands of years old.

The ancients--the greeks and romans--didn't use a lot of writing. It was expensive and bulky. Wax tablets were huge, papyrus was costly. You'd hardly have books; if you saw a scroll or codex, it was probably for the first and last time. If you saw a codex twice, there wasn't an index to reference; you had to know what was in it, flip to a random page, and say, "Oh, no, the material I need to reference is before this", then flip backwards.

Mnemonics techniques were a primary driver in the lives of the ancients. Their lives revolved around what they knew; what they knew revolved around what they could remember. They didn't have the luxury of remembering a topic existed and throwing a keyword into Google; they didn't even have the luxury of expansive libraries in every town. Libraries were places of pilgrimage: There may be one or two copies of a book in the world, and so you had to go to the library of a certain town to read it. The first and most important things the ancients learned was how to remember.

In modern days, we don't even teach study techniques. SQ3R and SQW3R, the most basic techniques, are powerful; so powerful that modern methods are just SQ3R and SQW3R with different names (PQRST is Preview, Question, Read, Self-recite, Test rather than Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review). Teachers incite small students to "take notes" and "study", without explaining what "study" entails; worse, the entire point of studying is to remember, yet memorization is considered a bad strategy in learning. The focus on "understanding" without first "knowing" knee-caps any effort to bring mnemonics into schools.

We're hell-bent on new technology and new methods, on progressive movements over regressive. While Japan turns second-grade students into human calculators with the Soroban--an ancient mechanical computer known as an abacus--the rest of the world feeds us blunt paper mathematics and teaches us to use TI-83 calculators and Excel spreadsheets as soon as we get to Algebra. Educators have not been so bold as to scrub all visual imagery from early education; yet they are resistant to using visualization, song, and rhyme beyond the most early years, and absolutely refuse to teach students to bolster their own memories with such techniques. The ways of the past are thrown by the wayside in favor of new ideas.

What poor, starving children most require, in third-world countries and in the ghettos of developed nations alike, is an education system; we cannot solve the education problem by throwing laptops at bush Africa or gangland America. We don't need specialized education systems, tools, and techniques for the poor or the retarded, either; those highly-beneficial methods which allow even the brain damaged to learn often make learning easier for any student. When such methods are found beneficial in both, the subgroup which is incapable--by class status or by mental development--of learning in the broader classroom atmosphere shrinks, and some of the disadvantaged can place directly in general population; this works wonders for social and psychological development. The last thing they need is expensive hardware and software pretending to help.

I really want to run on the education platform one day.

You haven't seen it all. Many people live 80 or 90 years and will tell you that they haven't come close to seeing or experiencing everything there is to life.

Your "can't build up much of an excitement for anything" is a textbook symptom of clinical depression, which is a treatable medical condition.

And even among non-depressed people, middle age very often corresponds to a dip in happiness which passes on its own as people get older.

Bombs Away LeMay ?

You're lack of understanding is beyond monumental. LeMay thought we could win a nuclear war. Kennedy despite his problems as president realized the best we could do was not lose as badly as our enemies.

It would also do you some good to understand our system of government is and was different than the Soviet Unions. Denouncing the First Secretary was not something that was done, until the person in power was done for. For a general to complain in our system is not only protected but often a prelude to seeking political office. Wesley Clark is a good current example.

Anyway, http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... this article details JFK's very difficult relationship with our military

Relevant quote for you

From the start of his presidency, Kennedy feared that the Pentagon brass would overreact to Soviet provocations and drive the country into a disastrous nuclear conflict

And yet, of all the major religious groups, muslims are the least likely to favor killing civilians.

How can these two things both be simultaneously true? Turns out what matters isn't the answers so much as the questions. The question that Pew asked in 2007 was often taken as suicide bombings to defend their community. And how many Americans of any religion think targeted strikes are morally acceptable in order to defend american lives? (After all a suicide bombing is the ultimate targeted strike) Even if it is on the other side of the planet where there are no americans? Turns out, more than 50%.

I think it's good for the public to see these kinds of things, so they can fully appreciate the reality of the threat posed to our society.

Your couch is more likely to kill you than a terrorist, bedwetter. Your threat assessment is about as good as a biker who insists on riding without a helmet but refuses to fly on a plane "because it might crash."

link: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

There's a wonderful article "The Case Against Credentialism" by James Fallows in the The Atlantic (1985) which reads as if it were written today: http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...

It assesses professional degrees like MBAs as being inherently worth next to nothing, essentially serving a broken agenda in which our highly credentialed leaders know everything about form but nothing about function. Maybe virtual expertise is enough to govern a virtual world?

Too bad the US political parties didn't read this prior to the 2000 election. Maybe the would have fielded worthier candidates (and staff), and the US could have saved about a million lives and a few trillion bucks). Such is the cost of driving under the influence, I guess.

I'm dismayed that you think science is a strictly liberal pursuit. Most conservatives are just as interested in science as your average liberal. You're perpetuating a meme that the republican party is the anti-science party. It isn't: http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

Another interesting factoid most people tend to overlook:
Chinas one child policy has doomed it to a rapidly aging population, not too dissimilar from Japan.
They know this.
Also, they are a country where there is a larger percentage of men than women. China has big problems, much bigger than the US.

Due to the US allowing in migration from(you guessed it...) we have kept our "fecundity" fresh and our average age lower than almost all other industrialized nations.

Here's an anecdote that suggests for some people being isolated is not productive

Working Best at Coffee Shops

It fits me. It might not fit everyone.

According to this most people work better with some amount of distractions

So, your public key crypto is still secure. Who Cares? You think you use an OS that can't easily be cracked by a myriad of pre-packaged exploit vectors purchasable today on the black market (where the NSA buys them, along with anyone else interested)? You don't.

Once you've been targeted by The Ferret Cannon, and your garaunteed vulnerable systems exploited by targeted malware, it's game over man.

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding. Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Indeed. Our educational system simply doesn't engage with kids in general, it's just that girls don't act out the general frustration in as obvious a fashion as boys do. By the time you get to higher education, you've selected out the kids who really can't deal with it at all. No other modern industry has the failure rate that we accept as normal in our educational system.

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School
How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding.
Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Free Speech in the states has never been interpreted as a right ... to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

OK, where to start? Firstly it's to "falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre"; secondly it wasn't law, it was part of a judges opinion; thirdly that opinion was given while suppressing a very clear cut case of protected political speech; fourthly that precedent has been overturned by later judgements; fifthly the judge who wrote that accepted that it's wrong and, sixthly, in many cases shouting fire in a crowded theatre, even falsely, is protected speech. Please stop using that quote.

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/

I've seen the flag-on-the-truck thing many times - never seen a confederate flag.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...
http://www.tampabay.com/multim...
http://onlyoneheaven.files.wor...
http://media.cmgdigital.com/sh...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0cuK...
https://historicstruggle.files...
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic...

I rest my case.

Everyone should watch this movie just as an act of patriotism.

Are you sure North Korea was actually the culprit? Bruce Schneier doesn't think so.

The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career.

Yeah the choice is kids or career without much water between the two. If you don't like that resign yourself to having your children raised by strangers and hired help, which for most isn't acceptable. Raising children takes time and effort, something that the convenience of white goods and reduced physical requirements in the workforce hasn't changed.

What we're seeing now is a lot of women who went into the workforce and discovered that they were going to be neither wealthy nor successful, just like 99% of men in the workforce. Instead they're going to have a middle class lifestyle that they'd probably have been able to enjoy anyway plus a family had they chosen to raise kids instead. Is it any wonder womens' happiness has been decreasing.

That's not to say that men shouldn't be househusbands except it seems women aren't very attracted by that. Patriarchy, right?

I think first of all that the religion of feminism needs to die loudly and publicly along with every other social engineering cult, and secondly that people need to learn to differentiate between "a career" and "financial independence". These aren't the same thing.

And do not mistake me for a conservative or a traditionalist, I am neither.

I'm sick of this bullshit myth.

Lasers do not cause Aircraft to crash.

It's never happened, it never will happen. I can't even focus my pen laser on my cat that's 10 feet away from me for more than a split second. Hitting the windshield of an aircraft that's at least 1000 yards away and traveling at at least 200mph?!?! At worst, you have a 1 in a billion chance of nailing the pilot directly in the retina, so yes, you shouldn't do it because that might annoy him. But it's not going crash the plane even if that happened.

Now, for all of you that are going to tell me I'm dumb and don't know what I'm talking about... Please provide evidence. Has any plane ever had an accident as a result of a laser? Any? I've heard from some irritated pilots, and I can understand that... I'd be irritated to. But to claim there was any chance of an accident and we need to limit consumer freedom to harmless technology, just so we don't annoy pilots? That's a joke.

And, I'm willing to offer evidence myself:
2013 Egyptian protests. Snipers on buildings and in helicopters we targeting opposition leaders. As a result, protesters started buying cheap green laser pointers in the market and using them to highlight Sniper and helicopter positions. Eventually, so many lasers would be focused on passing helicopters they looked like this:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...
and here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This went on every night for months. Dozens of aircraft, thousands of lasers focused on them continually... but not one single crash. None.

There's absolutely no way these laser pointers could cause a crash... and if they could, the NTSB should immediately require all aircraft to be retrofitted with polarized sheets on the inside of the pilots window. It'd cost a couple of dollars per aircraft and wouldn't infringe on the personal freedoms of the general population.

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

There are plenty of sourcesw around which talk about productivity when compared against work day length and even break/work intervals within the day if you do a quick Google search.

Not a SINGLE ONE of this sources says that more work is accomplished in an eight hour work day, than in a twelve hour work day. Of course shorter hours are more productive per hour, which is all these studies show. That is not the same as showing there is no incremental gain.

There are plenty of sourcesw around which talk about productivity when compared against work day length and even break/work intervals within the day if you do a quick Google search.

California doesn't have a no shots, no school policy....

See:
http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

Wealthy L.A. Schools' Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan's
Hollywood parents say not vaccinating makes "instinctive" sense. Now their kids have whooping cough.

I put this together from several sources. But some good general articles

http://www.clevelandfed.org/re...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.bls.gov/cex/2010/st...
http://visualeconomics.creditl...

You can Google and find a ton on this.

I prefer this memo: http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/

Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".

More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?

I prefer to discourage people from attacking my countrymen, and simultaneously limit their capabilities to do so. That often means killing the people who are trying to kill us, until they get the idea that trying to kill us is a bad idea. Their incompetence in killing us does not erase the trespass. People who get into accidents have their insurance rates go up. People who try to kill us get killed. Actions have consequences.

If your neighbor was trying to kill you, repeatedly, would you tolerate it? Would you find the milk in your cereal curdled one day from poison, push it away, then look out your window and say 'Ah, nice try Mohammed! Maybe next time!.' I mean, you might notice that next crude tripwire before you set off the IED in your hedges.

You wouldn't tolerate it. You'd have him thrown in jail at the first try. Back to the national scale, if the people trying to kill us are in countries that will have them thrown in jail, great. If not, well, now we're back to the concept of war between distinct states or peoples. The fact that one side is weak and incompetent does not mean they get to keep trying without reprisal.

What you seem to advocate- ignoring attacks by barbarians as just another risk in modern society- is in it's own special moral vacuum. I'm having a hard time fathoming how such a dereliction could seem morally superior to you, and I can only guess your education has been a steady diet of 'Western civilization is the worst thing that ever happened to the world.' That sort of 'critical theory' rubbish has been all the rage in higher education for decades.

(I'm not studied up enough on the topic at hand- 'enhanced interrogation'- to condemn it or defend it.)

I prefer this memo:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/

Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".

More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?

The problem with the whole "Accidents cause more deaths per year..." argument is that at what point does your argument fall apart? 10,000? 20,000? If you studied Bin Laden like I did, you'll find he wanted 2 million Americans dead. So, after 2 million dead, should we start fighting then? Or would you rather nip this in the ass long before we reach 2 million?

I prefer this memo:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/

Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".

More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?

I know it sounds crazy at first blush, but I think it would make sense to totally get rid of corporate taxes. (Replaced by other forms of taxation.)

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you tax the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

Some references:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/59...

This was 20 years ago so I don't know if I could find specific news stories today, but I had been in the middle east and the things the US papers were reporting about the Palestinians were flat out lies. I was frankly astonished. Before this I was naive and believed that newspapers were reputable and reliable.

Ah. Stuff like how the international press coverage is anti-Israel. Israel isn't likely to cut off your head for bad press.

Sometimes I wear a shirt that comes down to my ankles. (Think 1980s Alvin and the Chipmunks or John from Peter Pan or what men wear in parts of the Middle East.) All I have to prove is that with horseback riding largely a thing of the past, trousers are no longer necessary.

"If your rights are violated you deal with it later"

What exactly do you gain by consenting to an illegal request of a power they do not have?

Not get killed? Live for another day where you can fight for legal remedy, and hopefully create a legal precedent that will prevent such violations in the future?

Subservience only reinforces their grandstanding and power playing.

This is all bravado from your part. Until you have actually dealt with situations like that, face to face, you ought to temper it and think a little.

There are moments in life when it is appropriate to disobey a law and deal with the consequences (see Rosa Park or Gandhi, or recently Arnold Abbott).

This is specially true if violations of your rights (or your "violation" of an unjust law) is done in public, to bring awareness to a just cause. This is particularly true when violations are the manifestation of egregious institutions (colonialism, institutionalized racism, to less diabolical but still egregious ones such as laws preventing feeding of homeless.

Here, you, the generic "you", are full aware of it, and you have a made a decision to take the hit for a greater cause. On the other hand, there are times to play possum, in particular if violation of your rights just happen because you are there on the wrong time, being incidental of you just being you, without you planning to take the hit for a greater cause.

You coming from an event and getting arrested because "you" look the profile, or getting handcuffed while picking up your kids because you look suspicious, even when teachers are vouching for you. Etc, etc.

In such cases when you are just living your daily life, play possum, litigate later. This is specially true when you have family that depends on you.

Telling other people to go martyr just because it sounds good and right, that's just unhelpful bravado. This has nothing to do with doing the right thing, but everything to do with making a post where you sound brave and rightful.

Ignorance of the law on the side of the police is not an excuse, just as ignorance of law among a civilian is no excuse.

None of that justifies telling other people to escalate things when in a position of vulnerability. This is not a comic book, and you are not GI Joe.

Learn to pick your battles, and you pick them, learn how to fight and win them.

Who can worry about Kitty Cat Memes, with all the Evil Clown crime? http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

My friends in Denmark and Norway tell me that the word "Friend" in the north is much more reserved, and it has held Facebook back. But like Halloween, differences in culture have a way of being only a generation deep. My mother in law, in southern France, is no slouch with the LOLs.

That's pretty much Space Nuttery summed up. It's baffling to me, but there you go. My observations seem to show that a large proportion of these Nutters are programmers, misanthropes and the clinically depressed. One thing they have in common is a comic-book level understanding of real science and technology, and you can bet that they will fall back on emotionally-loaded doomsday scenarios to justify their beliefs.

As for the TV shows, well, they got their religion from Cosmism.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

There's nothing you can do except wait. These Space Nutters are brainwashed and can't see it.

That's right, so the pragmatic solution is to change US. Not dream about space colonies that will NEVER happen, EVER.

Where does this combination Doomsday/Space Salvation religion come from?

Oh...

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

A Republican by his actions and policies.

Oh, no you don't... You keep him. A Republican would not have withdrawn all troops from Iraq — allowing ISIS to bloom and necessitating a painful return.

A Republican would not have encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine by lifting all sanctions imposed over a similar invasion into Georgia.

A Republican would've continued to detain terrorist suspects — in Guantanamo or elsewhere — rather then order extrajudicial killings — most infamously one of Osama bin Laden himself.

No, Obama is an Illiberal Democrat through and through. But such people — yourself included — are famous for inability to recognize each other — so far are their deeds from their proclaimed ideals.

In Holland, everyone pays into the state health care system during their working years, with the money then disbursed to pay for later-in-life expenses

So nice to see the abundance of options people in other countries have. Is not it awesome to have a single provider of healthcare? You would never think of disagreeing with how those monies you've been paying all your life are (or aren't) disbursed, would you?

And if someone does get so disgustingly anti-social as to have such a discouraging thought, why, End-of-Life Counseling may be just what the doctor might order for him... Living past 75 is immoral, after all...

and that means living in Hogewey does not cost any more than a traditional nursing home

Well, that means that either it is not a particularly desired option, or that joining requires non-monetary "payments" — such as waiting in line for a few years, or paying a bribe, or knowing somebody in the right place...

As every INTELLIGENT person knows, diamonds are only semi-precious stones

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? (from 1982, but still relevant today), and The diamond myth,

As every INTELLIGENT person knows, diamonds are only semi-precious stones

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? (from 1982, but still relevant today), and The diamond myth,

http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Sadly, Space Nutters are adept at duping themselves. They think because they're intelligent in one domain, typically software, that their intelligence transfers to all scientific and engineering disciplines.

The romantic, grandiose visions of the Space Age Priests

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

combined with the NASA propaganda (and Russians too, obviously) has resulted in entire generations stunted by ridiculous notions about space.

Space is hugely empty and deadly. This planet is where we are and where we will all be. There's no magical warp drives or Death Asteroids hiding behind Jupiter, there's no one getting ready to mine asteroids to get the same resources we have here (prices are falling recently!)..

There's no aliens waiting to share their wisdom or steal our water, there's no cosmic guiding force pulling us to the stars. That's as absurd as wanting to dig to the center of the Earth because that yellow sphere you saw in books as a kid looks like it could taste like lemon meringue.

It's over, finished, done. The Space Age is in the past. Brush your hand over its eyelids, make your sign of the cross and zip up the body bag and slam the morgue door closed. None of the Space Age dreams will happen.

Ever.

So stop flogging that horse and get with the program, there are plenty of real, HARD actual problems that need solving right here and now!

Remember that Kennedy speech about doing it "because it's hard"?

Well?

For the first time ever, the researchers proved that microorganisms have the ability to trigger delicate physiological changes to the human body, without launching a full-blown attack on the human immune system.

The first? What about Toxoplasma gondii ?

TFA3 "Will Cheap Gas Undermine Climate-Change Efforts?" [...] "I don't think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today," Perl said. Instead, he explained, people may choose to fill up their cars and burn fuel while the costs are low. [...] "This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," Perl said. âoeSome people might have the willpower to stick with their program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before committing to a diet --- but if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty traumatic."

This dialogue is straight from the United States' temperance movement that led up to a Constitutional amendment and a decade of peril, a black market economy comparable in size to the real one, and the Federally-subsidized ascension of organized crime. Some people think they are being proactive, easing their view of a world 'sin tax' as a way to stay global catastrophe. They are being hoodwinked into believing that unless they act soon by accepting some prepared package of countermeasures, some point of no return would be reached. This is being done in the traditional way, fronting claims that the (terrorists, evil corporations, fossil fuel interests) have "almost won".

But the real tripe, such as Perl spouts, misrepresents and marginalizes the personal motives among the poor and middle class folks who've managed to (just) stay afloat, and use their resources to acquire certain contested 'things'. Complicated and realistic motives, the whole spectrum of survival through pursuit of happiness (aka sanity) are reduced to some simple addict-reward-temperance model that suits the purpose. Then add a dash of global imperative and we have things like

I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traffic is not morally second.
~Elizabeth Stuart Phelps who helped to 'ferment' a revolution

Abolish slavery, then alcohol? This lady says this in 1897, a time when neither women nor former slaves in the US were permitted to vote. Priorities problem, much? Now cheap gas and pure-CO2 is the alcohol of the 21st century, and the same style of temperance movement is forming. It is hip and trendy. No one will confront you if you publicly picket for temperance in these matters.

Perhaps they should. Because where the rubber hits the road, such temperance movements are ultimately damaging to society. Phelps may have believed that the abolition of alcohol would magically 'elevate the human condition' to such a degree that other pressing issues of her day would be somehow solved, that it was drunkenness that was denying women the vote, or any other issue of the day to which she could have refocused her effort.

I'll say it flat out. Real people tend to have rational and understandable reasons for doing what they do. They will choose a vehicle that can hold a family and haul a load with a measure of real metal to stabilize it and protect them. They will choose a $30k truck or minivan over a $50k Tesla because... they have a choice.

Real innovation arises by pursuing real solutions to problems that result in the right choice being the cheapest one, not the one least encumbered by taxation. The future does not depend on the 'price of gas'. Temperance movements are ultimately about removing choice from the equation.