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You're wrong. High tech companies are fleeing California for low tax states. In fact, high earners inevitably flee high tax states for low tax states:

Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average. Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

Here's a comparison between California and Texas that explains, in great detail, how and why Texas is kicking California's ass.. This is also why more than half the new jobs created in the last twelve months were created in Texas. Another reason is strong vs. weak or no public sector unions. One thing that articles notes:

Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas.

High tech employees are fleeing California for Texas, because they can keep more of what they make, the government isn't going bankrupt, and the roads and schools are now better in Texas. Despite all the money California spends on a a bloated public sector, the actual core services delivered are worse in California than they are in Texas:

“Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California’s government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.”

Here's a slightly older analysis from 2007. Since then, of course, things have gotten better (relative to the rest of the nation) for Texas and worse for California.

Low taxes and small government create jobs. High taxes and big government destroy jobs.

The 1st was slavery.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html

It says:

" We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts."

For the full story of how beneficial eliminating the US Income Tax would be, see:

www.fairtax.org

Indeed, clearly higher European tax rates lead to a better recirculation of the wealth and overall fiscal health superior to the US. Unless you actually look at the data. Belgium, Ireland, the UK Spain, Portugal and Greece all have higher private debt defaults than the US as a percentage of GDP, Germany is statistically equivalent. All of those states aside from Germany, despite higher taxes have a higher debt to GDP ratio and again, Germany is roughly equivalent. The Europeans may "love" their higher taxes, but they aren't any better at controlling their spending or debt, quite the opposite. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704140104575056751636031606.html

Amusingly enough....Maryland has also been a leader in the nation for job growth

Yep. That is mostly due to huge deficit spending by the Federal government, a lot of which somehow failed to make it out of the "Washington area", including Maryland, which surrounds D.C (for those unfamiliar with the geography.) You can see the effect of this here; the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area has seen far less decline than the rest of the nation.

Government hiring, spending spurs D.C.-area job creation

Choice quotes:

"The hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus money -- that was an enormous shot in the arm, and we really benefited from it in this area,"

Federal hiring accounted for roughly 19,700 of the D.C. area's new jobs...Federal spending also led to increased hiring in D.C.'s private sector. Professional and business service firms, which often provide contract work for the government, added about 13,500 new jobs last year thanks to an estimated $84 billion in government procurement spending.

Thing to keep in mind is that we just had an election here in the US. The stated goal of our newly elected House of Reps leadership (the folks actually responsible for writing the budget) is to revert discretionary spending to pre-TARP/stimulus 2008 levels. That 'discretionary' spending is the part that has propped up your local economy.

I suspect the next few years may be less 'amusing.'

Actually, reading farther down into the original article (two times removed from TFA), it appears the only flaw was in TD Ameritrade and JP Morgan apps on the iPhone, and their only flaw was to store the username in plain text. It did not store the password, which is why it was considered a minor flaw as it was not enough information to grant someone access to the account itself.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805704575594581203248658.html

I think to get the creepiness quotient expressed properly, 'service' should be in special quotes there.

This stuff is nothing new.
I think its repugnant that a customer needs to make a public sqwak in order to get good service (and thus have your complaining be a permanent public record for data-mining corps). But, on the other hand, at least customers are now better enabled to sqwak in the first place.

Wasn't Farmville one of the ones that WAS accused of sharing the userID? wsj story

NPR has become the main news-enemy again in the mind of a lot of conservatives after they fired Juan Williams a couple weeks ago for what appeared to be a somewhat conservative opinion. You can see the details here.

The reasons for firing do seem a bit contrived, but I haven't dug into it enough to know; it could be that good old Juan was sleeping with some executive's girlfriend or something and that's the real reason for firing.

I need to stop replying on this thread. It's obvious that most people don't want to listen, regardless of their party affiliation.

I'm sorry that you think that those evil Republicans filibustered the closing of GITMO.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/20/close-guantanamo-funding-senate-obama

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124234679032521923.html

Back in April '09 Schwartz sent an email out that touched on Oracle and Sun's employees. Specifically:

Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.

I suspect the most interesting point here is whether Oracle considers these departures to be a problem or not - the open source community obviously has its priorities and skill sets it would consider key, but Oracle may take a different view.

You describe how market makers create liquidity, but not how HFT's create liquidity.

This presumes that market makers and HFTs are two mutually exclusive things, when in fact, they are not (or at least, not *necessarily*). Many HFTs are (officially or unofficially - depending on the exchange & their relationship to it), market makers as well. Even if they're not designated market makers, their presence helps reduce the spread that market makers are offering (they will buy and sell to take advantage of the spread, exerting pressure on the bid/ask prices to get closer and closer together), which makes investment more efficient for 'regular' traders.

As far as 'no risk' for HFTs, of course they have risk. They could lose money if a stock tanks just like anybody else, and they have to have a buyer or a seller in order to unload their positions. They are not (necessarily) required by the stock exchanges to stay in the market in bad conditions (designated market makers would be, unofficial ones wouldn't), such as during the "Flash Crash" back in May, but many of them stayed in anyway.

A report by the CME Group reported that high frequency traders had no discernible impact on the flash crash back in May: the report.

The SEC also found that they perhaps magnified the impact of the crash, but that many of them also stayed in the market... providing liquidity... throughout.

There *are* issues where HFT programs could (and should) be subject to more regulation - flash functionality (essentially, a 30ms-faster peek on large pending orders for people who pay a fee for it) is a big one, and has mostly been disallowed already by the exchanges I'm aware of. Use of dark pools is another one that could probably benefit from increased oversight.

Essentially, the trading volumes created by HFT (estimates I've seen range from 50-70% of market activity) help to smooth out the big swings which can be caused by large trades - they act as a damping mechanism on the volatility of the market, and several studies (here's one from the Journal of Finance) have found that algorithmic / HF trading has a net-beneficial effect on the market.

The "It takes $1 billion and 5 years to launch a new vehicle" is simply bullshit. It make take that long if you do it the way Detroit does it, but history has shown that Detroit is doing it wrong! Modern businesses are no longer the huge vertically integrated monopolies of the early industrial age; it is now possible to buy everything from out of house. "Wrong kind of engineers" is also bullshit -- create a demand for automotive engineers and Stanford and Berkly will train them! Granted, there is a 4-year lag, but the reason there is a Silicon Valley in the first place is because the world-class universities in the area created a pool of world-class engineers. Again, having engineers that are trained to do things "the GM way" is a disadvantage, not an advantage.

Spoken like a true armchair CEO. Just so you know, the auto industry is already one of the most horizontally stratified industries out there. If you think they're vertically integrated, you're entirely wrong. Why do you think every auto maker nearly had a heart attack when GM/Chrysler were in dire straights. They all used the same suppliers. If one major supplier collapsed, the entire industry would take a hit. Don't believe me? Do some research.

Tesla is trying to change that. They're trying a more vertically integrated strategy. But everyone in the auto industry that actually understands how things work is laughing at them. Remember when they took hundreds of millions in government loans? Don't expect to ever see that back.

Oh, and you say that engineers will come... well Tesla tried that too. HQ based in California and tried to do R&D there. Only they realized the talent wasn't around... so they moved everything to Detroit.

Everyone thinks they know how to run an industry. Until you're actually put in charge or look into the details does one actually realize the difficulty of the task.

I don't think that's the problem at all. It's more like we don't punish success because it leads to less people becoming successful. And it's not that they think the 250k and up crowd can't afford to pay the taxes, it's that they shouldn't be singled out to pay for the demands of less successful people.

250k is an arbitrary number anyways. It's not even in the original bush tax cuts. All it seems to be doing is creating conflicts that shouldn't exist. According to the WSJ, the top tax payers are paying more with the cuts then they did in 1990. The interesting part is that with the enactments of the bush tax cuts outside of the first years it was in place, growth in income tax revenue increased at a pace as good as or better then in Clinton's term until the start of the recession and more taxes were collected then the costs of the tax cuts.

""Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister
in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone
does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any
public duty to pay more than the law demands."" - Judge Learned Hand

Of course, if we'd reign in corporate taxes, we'd bring a lot of capital back home. The US has one of the highest rates of corporate taxes in the world, trailing only Japan and Cameroon. Even France... bastion of Euro-Socialism Lite... has a lower top corporate tax.

The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that's already built.

Not that this isn't already brought up in every topic dealing with Wikileaks but here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575419580947722558.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_MIDDLESecondNews

Mr. Ozzie appeared to lose a key battle with Mr. Sinofsky two years ago when control of Live Mesh, a data synchronization technology developed by Mr. Ozzie's team, shifted to the Windows organization at the company. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560621481900644.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews#ixzz12pfWBEBA About a year ago, oversight of another initiative Mr. Ozzie was involved in, its Windows Azure cloud computing technology, moved to the server and tools business run by the division's president, Bob Muglia. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560621481900644.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews#ixzz12pfdfzcI

Mr. Ozzie appeared to lose a key battle with Mr. Sinofsky two years ago when control of Live Mesh, a data synchronization technology developed by Mr. Ozzie's team, shifted to the Windows organization at the company. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560621481900644.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews#ixzz12pfWBEBA About a year ago, oversight of another initiative Mr. Ozzie was involved in, its Windows Azure cloud computing technology, moved to the server and tools business run by the division's president, Bob Muglia. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560621481900644.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews#ixzz12pfdfzcI

Wow, you really don't know how this works in the real world, do you?

In the real world, anyone with actual talent quickly gets weeded out. Next goes actual production experience, in favor of mastering the album way too fucking loud so that everything clips out (yeah, looking at you Metallica, you fucking tone-deaf retards).

Next, if you don't have "the body" or "the look", forget it. Shitney Spears and the teenybopper whores get millions despite being worthless and talentless, because the marketing machines pump all their crap out, put it in boxes, and sell to brainless, clueless idiots.

Actual music is almost dead in America. As for the world, actual music is more endangered than the Panda.

Let's not be pedantic, these effects are more direct than you seem to be willing to realize.

Here we go, then. In 2007, the number of taxpayers in the top bracket was . . .

220

No, not 220 thousand. Just 220. Even with domino effects into the small business workforce, the tax rate of 220 people cannot possibly have a significant impact on the economy.

If your business actually is reinvesting into itself, then it's easy to find all sorts of tax brakes that keep you out of that top bracket. So what the above really means is that 220 people need to fire their accountant.

I'm willing to continue, but you're really going to have to try harder than this, or we're both just wasting our time.

I'm not wasting my time. I'm having a blast. Since teabaggers can't possibly be here to form a coherent ideology based around reality, the only other explanation is that they're here for my personal amusement. I thought I was clear about this already.

I agree that people put way too much blame and credit on the president for how things go, and by extension not enough on congress. However, saying there isn't much he can do is a bit misleading. For one thing he could order the various executive departments to stop doing everything they could to ignore basic rights.

Justices to Hear Appeal by Ashcroft Over Detention Suit
US justice department argues former detainees have no constitutional rights
Obama adopts Bush view on the powers of the presidency.
Ruling Against Bush Wiretaps Also Slaps Down Obama's Executive Overreach

The link in the article leads to a spam link page with a big timed Flash ad. The actual Wall Street Journal article mentioned is here.

I'll be the first to admit that I was misinformed about the actual damage caused by wikileaks' first batch of leaked Afghanistan documents, and now that I know the truth it does change my opinion somewhat.

I was initially supportive of wikileaks, as I am of responsible whistle blower groups in general. When the government and Fox news attacked wikileaks, it didn't phase me a bit - that was expected, and provided zero credible information. However, when Amnesty International and others rights groups came out and criticized wikileaks for not doing a good job protecting Afghan informants, that caught my attention. Those are groups that I trust to put the well being of the Afghans above politics, and I assumed that they had done their homework. That was followed by other wikileaks members publicly distancing themselves from Assange because they felt he was not doing enough to redact the documents before publishing them.

Even if I wasn't working or going to school I wouldn't have had time to personally review 700,000 pages of documents for myself. We are all dependent on others to provide information to us, and have to be careful who we trust. Given these independent sources it seemed reasonable to me to conclude that Assange wasn't being responsible in disclosing the documents the way he did. Now that report has been leaked, however, I am more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that he will do the right thing with the next batch of documents.

But go ahead and assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a "patriotic tool" who only gets their news from FOX. Calling people names is a great way to change people's mind and strengthen support for your cause.

Unlike Conflict Diamonds, it's really hard to trace where the Conflict Rare Earths come from.

Blood diamonds may not be all they are cracked up to be.

Besides, the conditions under which many "conflict-free" diamonds are mined ought to be enough to take the lustre off the stone too.

Babies can be so fucking stupid sometimes.

Not as stupid as Republicans. http://online.wsj.com/itp/20101015/us/opinion

Ummm.... if it's "non-satellite imagery," where else could it be from?
I'd think a guy taking pictures out of a Cessna wouldn't be very economical long-term compared to a drone.

Yeah, and I'd think a guy taking pictures out of a car to make a map as he drives up and down every single street in the world wouldn't be very economical... oh wait. (Then again, drones you say? Oh snap.)

hey held back 15 thousand pages to protect people's names while they tried to sort through them. Google it.

I believe it. But "trying not to leak names" and "not leaking names" are not the same, and there is a real risk of death to the people trying to help save the lives not only of US troops but their own countrymen. For what? Daily incident reports that largely tell us nothing we don't know? That drone attacks are less successful than the spokesman says? That an Afghan policeman was shot by the Afghan army when he was smoking hash in the shower, got spooked and started firing at them? Does anybody in the world not know that the government of Afghanistan is weak yet? Is this "insight" really worth even the potential of getting people killed?

They asked the pentagon to tell them which name to remove, the pentagon told them to go to hell.

You make this sound like a bad thing. The Pentagon was supposed to help Assange with his goal of disseminating classified information to unauthorized sources? You think anybody involved wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole, which would be illegal for them to do in the first place? Especially anybody with the clearance to actually read the damn things without committing another crime? It was a false request, designed to paint them as uncaring when he did what he was going to do all along.

They did remove names, and they got no one killed.

You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.

As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php

The people who said they were gonna get people killed are the people who actively do indeed actually kill real people, have been for years, plan on doing it for years still

Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.

War sucks. Maybe this war should never have been started; maybe it should end tomorrow. But these are not, not nearly, the same thing.

In one of your approximately eight billion posts in this thread saying basically the exact same things over and over again you asked for reasons that Assange is an egotistical, self-centered prick. How about from human rights groups?

Mr. Assange asked what the groups were doing to analyze the documents already published, and asked whether Amnesty in particular would provide staff to help redact the names of Afghan civilians, according to people familiar with the letter.

An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.

Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.

Later, WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter account: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"

-- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575419580947722558.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews

These are reall

You're right in that the research of MMann didn't cost the university more than $500k but if you do a google search you'll find a WSJ article stating that he recived $541k dollars in stimulus funds in june 2009, so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs, and of course the implementation cost of the policy he advocates and do research to support would have a pricetag several magnitudes higher.

I believe this is the article you're talking about. And I believe it's referring to 'last June' when Michael Mann was teaching at Penn State. Mann only taught at UVA from 1999 to 2005. Here's the paragraph:

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

Emphasis mine. So he received another half a million to continue his research this year? And that's wrong because? Also, Ken Cuccinelli holds no domain over Pennsylvania State University. See, when a university is given the authority to decide where its funds go, you usually don't spend twice that much money investigating whether or not the research done meets your statistical muster or political goals -- especially when you're not an expert in that field!

... so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs ...

Yeah, you could look at Mann's whole life and his health insurance and everything but we're not. We're focusing on one particular study done by Mann for half a million dollars carried out at UVA.

Have fun tracking down every climate scientist gathering funds for any kind of climate research and charging them with wasting taxpayers dollars. By the time you're done, it will be impossible to draw any scientific conclusion about climate change because any indication that you construe to be economically painful will be met with lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.

Microsoft and Adobe merging is an option that would increase efficiency. That way I can direct my hatred in one direction with less distraction from various evil companies.

OK, if you Don't Wanna Be Evil, how about
Google? They've got even more interest in Flash-on-mobile as a stopgap against Apple World Domination as Microsoft does, and could probably write a PDF viewer in less than 100 megabytes.

GooDobeSoft

Microsoft and Adobe merging is an option that would increase efficiency. That way I can direct my hatred in one direction with less distraction from various evil companies.

OK, if you Don't Wanna Be Evil, how about Google? They've got even more interest in Flash-on-mobile as a stopgap against Apple World Domination as Microsoft does, and could probably write a PDF viewer in less than 100 megabytes.

like, for example, importing the stuff from mongolia. this may turn out to be the faster and cheaper way out.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704380504575529383600995748.html

The most interesting part of this mini-debacle is how did the idea that there would be a shortage of rare earth elements came about at all, and why did the Chinese believe it, the idea being utter bullshit.

While it is true that China manages to produce these cheaply at the moment, rare earth elements are available basically all over the place in similar proportions.

Using them as a policy-making tool has done no harm to Japan, and potentially a lot of harm to the credibility of China as an economic player, especially to its counterparties in Asia, but also anyone who may have a reason to expect potential future clash of interests.

While the Japanese acted out during the crisis as scared pussies, the Chinese appear to have played the role of the dumber party.

Seeing great Asian powers like Japan and China just learning to dab at foreign relations after 6 decades of American dominance is very interesting.

Yeah like in this article!!!!

Over at WSJ they're posting that the new HP CEO is making $1.2B/year. But hey, what's three orders of magnitude among friends?

I think the anti union feel comes from unions acting like asses in many cases. For example in Michigan if you are in child day care you must, by law, be part of the union. Actually it's more cryptic than that. If you have a day care You are a government employee and get union dues deducted. No choice on the matter even if you're a sole proprietor running your own small day care.

Or even been to a tradeshow? Want to plug something into an electrical outlet, like you have done countless times in your life? Sorry, wait for a union electrician to show up because it's part of their union contract (Not an insurance matter most of the time).

Or maybe a Production engineer at a plant, with an assembly line down to something stupid like a tripped breaker, valve stuck, one of the normal reasons for a lockup. You could get the line going within a heartbeat but instead waste lots of manhours waiting for the one certified union worker to push the button for you.

It's because of these stupid rules, that while the intention may have started as good, hurts the company as a whole and gives unions a bad rep. Now I do have a history in the trades and I thing the formal journeyman / masters process is a very good thing. The bureaucracy is an entirely other thing.

Just ignore him. The almighty algorithm is not flagging him as a "risk to leave" yet: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html
Not joking, here is a quote from Google VP of HR: "[Our human resources algorithm helps Google] get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave,"
In any case, algorithms work on data and the level of spying on your own employees to have the data to back the above claim frankly scares the living world out of me. Do no evil? Some other time...

Translation of that post can be summed up as:

You have an intriguing and valid point but because it conflicts with my ideology and imposed beliefs, I will totally ignore it on it's face, insinuate some pretty clever (at least for his IQ level)strawman points that neglect the reality of the issues, and go on to pretend that I won this argument without ever bringing a counter point up or disputing anything with merit.

Here is what is wrong with the reply.

So you're right wing and believe that freedom is about the right for the rich to be happy while the poor suffer, got it.

Whether he is a right winger or not is irrelevant. He said nothing about anything that would insinuate that only the rich should be happy. He stated that a limit of 20% is the most any government should be taxing without infringing on your freedoms. How is limiting the amount taxed only making rich people happy? Especially if government could be structured to operate on that limit and provide the needed services we have come to expect from it?

Yes, that's flamebait from my side but the way you argue suggests that you don't understand how important the services provided by taxes are.

You mean the services like funding a campaign to show African males how to wash their pecker after sex to slow the spread of aids and VD in South Africa that was funded by the US stimulus money? Here is your problem, you automagically assume that government services are important. Some are, some are simply a waste of funds. However, the efficiency of government can be vastly improved in most situations making providing many of those services less costly in the end. You seem to be totally ignoring both the reality of the situation and imposing some artificial cover to it.

bla bla bla evil gubmint bla bla bla

Ah, you're one of those guys. American I assume?

Yea, this alone probably makes you unqualified to comment on this. Lets see, you dismissed his comments without ever providing a country or showing how he was wrong, yet you seem to be ignoring everything in order to do so. Here is a hint, reality is whatever doesn't disappear when you close your eyes, I suggest you start paying attention to what it is you are commenting on and then structure your comment appropriately to it. If you do that, you won't seem like the ideological ass you come off as while pretending someone else is and you might even realize the truth of the matter which is that life and government is not strictly a left verses right issue and neither ideologies are perfect.

I was under the impression that Pandora's recording and skipping restrictions were due to licensing restrictions. I'm not really seeing how making a huge investment in hardware manufacturing is going to help that.

Also, didn't Slacker give up on dedicated hardware in 2009?

We should probably note here that the Wall Street Journal printed all kinds of denials from the Chinese. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704062804575509640345070222.html Me, I'm just annoyed that we can't get a real industrial policy together to support a rare earth metals industry in the US. Got annoyed enough to write a piece for The Atlantic about it: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/worried-about-chinas-monopoly-on-rare-elements-restart-american-production/63444/ One thing to watch out for on the rare earth metal tip is that the Department of Defense is releasing a report on their use for military purposes in the beginning of October. Will be interesting to see what they say.

I'm always suspicious when I hear people say, "that's how it was in the past, but now is different...." It's probably not different. The jobs move, the industries change, but even the great depression ended. You are right that manual labor jobs are disappearing, but they are also growing in other fields (see here for a quick analysis). The industrial revolution was brutally hard, much harder than the current downturn, as jobs switched from traditional labor and farming to higher skilled jobs. The same thing is happening now, jobs are moving from moderate skill to higher skill. In the modern world, being able to learn new skills is the most important skill. If you can't do it, you'll be lost.

I'm not going to disagree with your assessment of the inflation rate, you're probably right, but we haven't had hyper-inflation either (and we can survive hyper-inflation if we do get it). The biggest factor is healthcare: most of the wage gains over the last decade have gone to paying higher healthcare (remember you have to include the portion of healthcare that the employer pays). It's costing around $10,000 a year to insure a person these days. A lot of the healthcare money is going to cover old people and new, expensive, treatments (there's a new treatment for hep-C, for example, but it costs $50,000; and hip replacements aren't cheap either). So total compensation is increasing, it's just not going where you want it to. Jobs will come back after the recession, but maybe not the same job you had before.

As for the definition of unemployment, I assume you are referring to those people who have stopped looking for a job not being included in the official rate. I have no sympathy for able-bodied people who can't even manage to apply for one job a month, or otherwise try to improve their skills. Let them starve.

It's because science says one thing one day, and weeks later says the opposite. Also, scientists argue among themselves about what the conclusion should be.

I can't find the original article off hand, but approximately 33 percent of research turns out to be wrong, according to one study. This article doesn't put a number on it, but estimates a lot higher.

Bottom line, journalism makes science look like a bunch of bumbling clowns because it can't summarize research correctly, and the scientists sometimes do a bad enough job themselves that they don't need help bungling the conclusion. I have this argument all the time with people who don't understand how the scientific method works, and the difference between internet news and peer-reviewed journals.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118972683557627104.html

(if it's blocked put the URL in google and click from there).

Finally, regarding gp post, you seem overly sensitive. I didn't read that as a "here's the obvious, maybe that explains it?" post. But maybe I give people more credit than they deserve.

Does that help you understand?

Do you still remember the term "netbook"? That's a good use for Chrome OS. Though it will be nice if we could see Android and Chrome OS for different tablet devices. After all, "tablet" is going to be meaning something like "computer," and having different OSes for different tablets isn't that bad.

Also, Google itself have admitted that Android currently isn't the OS for tablets. They say version 3.0 will be their "tablet-friendly" Android. Maybe that's why Motorola says it won't enter tablet market until 2010. They say they want to deliver a device thats "competitive in the marketplace." I guess that means they can't compete with iPad with Android 2.2.

"You'd think Intel would just accept they suck at GPUs and buy Nvidia already."

Should Intel buy nVidia? Jen-Hsun Huang, who averages about $23.02 million per year, is not the sort of person who would easily integrate into Intel, and he is important to the leadership of nVidia. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, makes about $14 million.

Soon Intel's integrated graphics will have mid-range speed, leaving only the high range for nVidia. The high range of video adapters is mostly bought by teenagers who want to practice being violent with video games, instead of practicing being involved with other people. That means nVidia will be dependent on buyers who are being self-defeating; eventually there may be a backlash against that.

The high range of video performance will always be needed for architectural drawing and machine design, for example, but the total demand will drop, as the nVidia stock price seems to indicate. So, maybe nVidia is not a good purchase for any company.

Should Intel CEO Paul Otellini be replaced? Another reason Intel should not buy nVidia is that Intel is generally a failure at anything besides making new CPUs and support chips. For the success of Intel and AMD in making CPUs, the world can be extremely thankful; that's enough success for any company.

But Intel in other areas seems amazingly badly managed. Intel marketing seems completely out of control. Is the product confusion at Intel a deliberate, sneaky way to sell slow processors to technically challenged customers, or just stupid?

Quote from the article linked just above: "Sandy Bridge PC processors will keep the CORE-i3, i5, and i7 designations and will be rebranded the "new CORE-i3..." That approach is likely to create confusion among customers about exactly what they're buying, given that the average user likely wouldn't be able to pick a Nehalem i7 from a Westmere i7 or Sandy Bridge i7."

Either Intel's purchase of the inferior security software maker McAfee for a "lofty 60% premium" is a HUGE mistake, or the reasons why it is not a mistake should be explained by Intel marketing. No explanation was given, apparently. McAfee has a 21.9% market share selling software often pre-loaded on a computer to technically challenged buyers.

Quote from the article: " 'We believe security will be most effective when enabled in hardware,' Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a conference call." That seems a particularly wacky statement. "Security software" is needed only because, in my opinion, Microsoft deliberately allows its software to be insecure. Insecure software makes Microsoft more money because people with infected computers often buy another computer. For example, see the New York Times article, Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. The Apple Mac OS, Linux, and BSD operating systems do not require "security software" because they are made to be secure.

Intel CEO Otellini does not seem to have the social sophistication necessary to running a big company. When he made an announcement in 2006 about the Intel Eduwise laptop, he seemed to be intending to have Intel compete with MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity program. However, Intel's intention seems to be just to make a market fo

The Wall Street Journal also had analysis; they said that Apple can afford to lose a chunk of market share (in a growing market) and instead should worry about the competition driving the price down. Here's the story (do the google-the-URL thing to get a good Referer: if it doesn't show the whole thing).

It is not a given that Apple will lose market share. Apple may not be the player that is displaced by Android. Android is more likely to displace all the in-house operating systems being used by the handset manufacturers. For example Nokia could announce that they have dropped Nokia OS and Symbian OS and will use Android for all upcoming handsets.

The situation is not unlike Linux and Microsoft. Despite Microsoft being widely perceived as the competitor to Linux, it was really Sun Microsystems and other traditional Unix vendors that were displaced. Similarly I expect it will largely be the traditional handset operating systems that will be displaced, not necessarily Apple.

The Wall Street Journal also had analysis; they said that Apple can afford to lose a chunk of market share (in a growing market) and instead should worry about the competition driving the price down. Here's the story (do the google-the-URL thing to get a good Referer: if it doesn't show the whole thing).

You are arguing against purchasing American goods manufactured in China. Foxconn is responsible for much more than iPods and iPhones but let's use the iPod as an example (because we can extrapolate fairly easily that what holds true in this case will remain true in similar cases). It is well known that the iPod is produced in China, but how much of the value of an iPod do you think remains in China? You might be surprised.
Do you honestly think that the companies would all of a sudden up and close shop in China and start manufacturing in America with labor? They would automate as much of the process as possible. Finally, a recent paper shows that because of wage imbalances, the actual amount earned by American workers far outstrips that of non-US workers. PDF Link
And as a final prod - how much do you enjoy the low prices available from newegg or wherever in order to build your own machine? That doesn't happen without globalization. Your option would not only displace Chinese workers, it would also not help a substantial amount of American workers in the long-run.

It's already being attempted for homes... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703314904575399290511802382.html

Last time I checked, California had a MASSIVE budget crisis.... yet they have money to blow on iPads? Jesus... what's next?

A high-school for over half a billion dollars?

Budget crisis? What budget crisis?

Yep, and increases your chances getting ALS every time.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704554104575435850832715586.html

Don't underestimate the degree of blatant hypocrisy in play here. Drinking and extramarital sex are absolutely forbidden in middle-eastern culture, which just makes them all the more attractive. Repress something, and all you do is drive it underground. Since the middle-east tries to repress everything, well...

Take Bahrain as an example. While Bahrain is pleasant enough, they are connected by a bridge to Saudia Arabia. When the weekend (Thursday) rolls around, the bridge is jammed with Saudi Arabians coming to to party - getting smashed and getting laid - which they can't get away with at home.

Of course there are holes in the firewall - how else can the upper classes get their porn?

Consider the source on this: Breitbart.com, purveyor of phony news http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/07/29/shirley-sherrod-to-sue-andrew-breitbart/ Briebart.com has no more credibility than The Onion.