The airlines know different people will pay different amounts for the same flight. They are somewhat monopolists on a given route so they want to charge each customer the most that customer will pay. To do this they try and divide the customers into buckets such as first class, business, economy, or when you buy or if you want to change your flight. It might be that people willing to fly the shorter flight are generally richer and willing to pay more but at the same time it might be worth it to sell a longer flight for less because the people taking the longer flight won't pay as much but they will pay more than the marginal cost of the empty seat..
This is a huge loss to the industry. Before they could threaten people or at least claim that people must fly the entire route. Once they went to court though, they actually had to prove it and in losing more people will use the "hidden city" work around. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the airlines. Many of their tricks to determine how much I will pay for a flight are morally questionable.
1) Lack of security. If parents can't protect their daughters they will marry them off at a young age to someone who might be able to. This is the main reason for high birthrates in places like Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not have high birth rates 40 years ago under communism.
2) Stable careers for young men. If men in their late teens can get stable careers they will marry their girlfriends and start having families. This was the main driver of population growth in the industrial revolution. Young men getting factory jobs. They might not have been great jobs by our standards but they were enough to feed a family.
If you look at most Western countries today few men under 30 have a stable career, most are in debt. How many women want to start pumping out babies with these men? I have 5 kids, you don't get five kids if you don't start having them in your 30s.
This isn't so much a problem for English speakers. We see the URLs as the ASCII characters but eventually ICANN decided to approve punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... so we could have URLs in other character sets. The problem is that there are hundreds of character sets and many of these have characters that are visually difficult to distinguish. So now I can have two URLs that might actually be displayed identically in my browser that are actually different. I'm not 100% sure how this could have been avoided. It sucks for the non-english world. It could however have been mitigated if CAs check for URLs that are visually similar to existing URLs and not sign the certs for the new requests. With Certificate Transparency their is no excuse to not have a list of all valid signed URLs.
Meng Wanzhou has been arrested and is facing an extradition hearing in a Canadian court. The courts are part of the judiciary. John McCallum was literally the voice of the Canadian government in China. The government can never give its opinion on an individual's ongoing case while it is before the courts. I think after McCallum's first comments it was assumed he would either resign or at least apologize. The fact that he gave another opinion on the case is completely outrageous and shows McCallum to be completely ill suited to be an ambassador or to work in any capacity as part of the government. The Canadian prime minister is going to get grilled on this issue for not having fired McCallum sooner.
Note it doesn't matter if McCallum's statements are true, false, or just his personal opinion. The fact that he is the Canadian Ambassador to China means he can't say those things.
We get upset at CEOs who only care about the next quarters profits but as a species we rarely look ahead more than a year. Case in point everyone knew the Grand-banks fisheries off Canada's east coast were on the verge of collapse and yet we fished them right up to the point of nearly wiping out the cod there. Canadians dump more than 22 tons of GHG per person into the atmosphere (and BTW that's not counting the rotting pine forests). We beat the Americans by over 10% and yet we are doing almost nothing. If you can't get a well educated population that actually thinks climate change is a problem to change their ways there is no hope.
This is a job that is 99% matching symptoms to diseases and then looking up the cure. And the good thing about AI would be that they would actually learn from their mistakes instead of burying them. (I'm only half joking, the feed back mechanism for many doctors is limited or too slow to result in significant learning)
Hydrogen is a way of storing energy the same as a battery. Today batteries are better in every possible way except possibly air travel. Hydrogen is dangerous, hard to store and hard to transport. Again, except possibly for air travel, hydrogen is either expensive or less efficient to turn back into mechanical energy.
Up until 5 years ago I could make an open source project and make money off it by providing services. Engineering liked this because they felt safe that they weren't locked into a single vendor who might go bankrupt. Accounting liked the word free even if the service costs eventually cost more. The model seemed good for everyone.
Then came AWS. The software users are willing to pay for something they feel is tangible, computing time, storage and support. AWS is amazing for all three but then AWS became the support for the open source projects. The end customer started paying AWS for support and not the companies developing the open source project. Also AWS support is far better than what any single open source company can offer. The open source financing model for things like MongoDB went from workable to impossible in just a few years.
I place a value on each type and the requirement to win the war with the lowest cost. My soldiers cost w, my civilians are x, their civilians are y and their soldiers are z. w>x>y>z. The only thing that I see that is a problem is most politicians or bureaucrats will set w=x=MAX_INT, y=z=0. That's not an AI problem at all but a fundamental problem in democracies.
This is a key agreement scheme for privacy. Someone wants to keep something secret forever. Today Alice and Bob can use regular encryption to prove they are talking to each other and agree on a secret key using certificates and things like Diffie-Hellman key exchange. We have know how to do this for almost 40 years. The problem with all of this though is that if someone records the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (or other key agreement scheme) and the subsequent communication and computing or math advances in the future to the point where the D-H key exchange can be broken then the communication will no longer be secret. Now if you are the government, communication you do today could be very embarrassing if it was revealed 20 or 30 years from now.
Right now we are back to suitcases with key tables. If an embassy wants to send something that must be kept secret for 50 years, it pretty much has to be physically delivered or the keys for the communication must be physically delivered. Everyone is recording as much communication as they can and trying to build a quantum computer to break the key exchanges. Who will be first? The Americans, the Chinese, the University of Waterloo with money from everyone else???
QKD is simple to understand, I send you a bunch of pulses of photons, you send me back the way you read them, I send you a list of the times you read them the correct way. We now have a subset of photons that we correctly exchanged that we can use as a key. Does it work? As others have pointed out, it only really works if you only send 1 photon at a time. It fails if I send lots of photons each time (which I really need to do) and our attacker has better equipment than we do (which they always will because they get to build theirs after we commit and deploy).
The trouble is that it used to be expensive to have 51% of the computing power because of all the hardware you would have to buy. That is no longer true. Now I can rent the computing power to have 51% computing power for the length of the confirmation period. Here is a link https://www.crypto51.app/ to the cost to rent so much computing power and the percentage of the required computing power you can rent. You will notice that as of January 8th you could rent 102% of the computing power to launch a 51% attack on Etherium classic and it would only cost you $4700
There are 2 big reasons for residential batteries increase emissions. Politics and stupidity, the stupidity I see already in the comments. It will always be economical with people to share generation and storage of electricity. The more people and the further spread out geographically the better. You can form small groups for local management and then larger groups to spread out differences in local demand, weather and generation. Let's call the local groups utilities and the larger group a grid. You can set up solar panes on your roof and buy and sell the electricity to the utility. The utility can then sell or buy from any other utility in the grid. The utility can also have its own local storage to reduce transporting between utilities and also reduce infrastructure locally. Next we need to have the same pricing structure between all players. So when base load nuclear, wind and solar are all producing at their maximums the price can go to zero and when it's a hot cloudy summer afternoon with no wind the price can go to $10/kwh. One bonus of allowing the price to swing like this is that consumers will change their behaviour. Storing electricity is hard, changing behaviour is easy if you have the political will.
I worked on a very large pilot in Oklahoma. We everyone two pricing options and they paid the lower one at the end of the month. The first was the current system of 12 to 20 cents per kwh. The second was peak prices of $0.78 and the lowest price was free. Average savings per month was $50. Savings for the utility would have been double that. The reason for the huge savings to the utility is it would have reduced the utilities peak demand. Over 10% of a utilities infrastructure is used for only hours a year. Eliminate that peak and you save the utility tens of billions of dollars. The pilot was an amazing success. The regulator of the utility then went and fucked the entire thing up so badly that they pretty much killed the idea for all of North America. Oh, and the politicians all patted themselves on the back for preventing an evil utility from making huge profits. If Oklahoma and Gas and Electric had rolled out the concept for everyone in the state their profits under their new regulated prices would have dropped.
Why the fuck would anyone live in a neighbourhood where you have to lock your door or worry about stuff being stolen in your yard? If you live somewhere that dangerous and read slash dot I'm guessing you can afford to move to a first world nation.
When I lived most of the workers were essentially migrant workers. We got paid a lot but no one intends to stay. My experience with a family of 4, our costs went up 50% (150K to 230K) and our cost of living went up 60% (40K to 65K). But our after tax savings went from 60K to 95K. That's pretty significant for a young family. The healthcare there was far better than in Ontario and the public schools (if you choose the right ones) are amazing. Weather is unbearable if you happen to be a family of red heads though.
Cancer kills an individual creature. Even if 90% of a species is killed by cancer most species would bounce back. However a mutation that made all of an individuals off spring a single sex would lead to extinction of most species. Our genome is full of defenses against these types of mutations and the genomes of more than a few species are littered with the scares of near misses.
I had a job where we had a voluntary salary reduction of 20% and got one day a week off for 6 months. In Canada, a company has to offer you a choice to accept such a cut and give you severance if you don't. If you don't have a job to go to you have no real choice but to accept the cut but immediately started looking for a new job. I waited till the end of the 6 months for my current company to communicate what they intended to do with the 20% cut. This time if they repeated the 20% offer I was taking the severance. The day the 6 month reduction finished came and went and the company didn't say anything. I wasn't going to say anything and weaken my position with respect to the severance. I wanted a written offer for the extension of the 20% reduction that I could refuse. In the end time ran out. I was starting the new job on the Monday and it was Friday afternoon when I quit.
I'm surprised no one complained about interviewing for government jobs where they already know who they want to hire but are going through the motion to follow show it was a competitive process.
When we increased the efficiency of burning coal guess what, we used more. That can be said about a huge number of other things we consume. As we increase the efficiency the usefulness tends to increase significantly faster that the efficiency gain. So we have more efficient engines now, the result has been moving from driving a car to an SUV. Then we drive the SUV even further. If the ICE cars become less efficient then the cost advantage of electric cars will actually increase to the point no one will buy a new ICE car.
This is so stupid for the oil industry to push it's either fake news or the oil industry has really lost anyone who has half a brain and all that's left is stupid psychopaths.
I'm willing to bet there was never any intention to arrest her. She broke an American law and someone at the DoJ just went through the motion of getting the arrest warrant for her. They never thought it would be acted on as she wasn't going to come to the USA. They failed to realize that the extradition treaty with Canada bound the RCMP to arrest her. I suspect there is a lot more wiggle room in the USA on acting on arrest warrants than there is in Canada.
I'm not saying the currencies are safe against active attackers, or people wishing to just mess with the block chain, this is just about privacy and scanning the block chain.
Assuming we can create a secure hash function and people use truly random numbers then the ring signatures used in Monero are secure in that they reveal no knowledge about who signed the message. Anyone of the private keys associated with the public keys could have been the signer. Your next option would be to try and track transaction inputs and outputs but even these permit any possible value. So just looking at the block chain, even if you have a quantum computer and can solve the discrete log problem (DLP), you aren't going to learn much. As an active attacker, one who is creating outputs that they hope their intended victim will then use as inputs, and again possessing a way to solve DLP, maybe but you will have to solve one DLP for every attack. There might be a way to double spend many times if you could solve the DLP once. That's because you could solve a relation between two generators of the elliptic curve group used by RCTTypeFull, but that exploit will likely be closed before anyone develops a working quantum computer large enough to attack Ed25519.
Further reading: https://www.getmonero.org/libr...
Zcash uses a different group membership algorithm. It could be broken if you had a quantum computer, but again you have to solve either the DLP or RSA problem for each transaction you wish to investigate. It will be years before that computing power is feasible to spend on one transaction. There are no good resources, that I would recommend, for Zcash and other zero coin derivatives.
And crypto currencies. If you choose to ignore the two biggest uses today then I wonder how many others they "missed"
https://www.certificate-transp...
Moore's law hit an economic wall not a physical one. The cost of R&D and of fab plants has also been growing exponentially, doubling every 30 months. The market for chips also grew quite a lot in the last 45 years. However not nearly as fast as the cost of fabrication. So what we saw was less and less fab plants on the leading edge. We are now down to two companies pushing the envelope for large complex processors and it looks like one (Intel) is going to take a small pause.
The suburbs and rural living kill you now. Both are completely car dependent now. That wasn't true 30 years ago. New subdivisions are designed so that you do all your shopping in big box stores. You don't walk anywhere and you barely even talk to your neighbours. It would make most kids suicidal or drug addicts. The rural areas lost their youth to cities, their local stores to the big box stores and their sense of community. The USA might claim an unemployment of under 4% but a better number to look at is the work force participation rate for white males between 20 and 44. It's only 83%. That's abysmal. The USA is getting very sticky as far as moving. New immigrants are willing to move for work but existing people in rural areas are not. As a result many have given up on finding work so they don't count as unemployed. We need to change our urban planning so people can live in cities and be neighbours again. Otherwise more of us will be going to the funerals of our children.
Slashdot Mirror
The airlines know different people will pay different amounts for the same flight. They are somewhat monopolists on a given route so they want to charge each customer the most that customer will pay. To do this they try and divide the customers into buckets such as first class, business, economy, or when you buy or if you want to change your flight. It might be that people willing to fly the shorter flight are generally richer and willing to pay more but at the same time it might be worth it to sell a longer flight for less because the people taking the longer flight won't pay as much but they will pay more than the marginal cost of the empty seat..
For more understanding read:
http://www.economicsdiscussion...
This is a huge loss to the industry. Before they could threaten people or at least claim that people must fly the entire route. Once they went to court though, they actually had to prove it and in losing more people will use the "hidden city" work around. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the airlines. Many of their tricks to determine how much I will pay for a flight are morally questionable.
1) Lack of security. If parents can't protect their daughters they will marry them off at a young age to someone who might be able to. This is the main reason for high birthrates in places like Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not have high birth rates 40 years ago under communism.
2) Stable careers for young men. If men in their late teens can get stable careers they will marry their girlfriends and start having families. This was the main driver of population growth in the industrial revolution. Young men getting factory jobs. They might not have been great jobs by our standards but they were enough to feed a family.
If you look at most Western countries today few men under 30 have a stable career, most are in debt. How many women want to start pumping out babies with these men? I have 5 kids, you don't get five kids if you don't start having them in your 30s.
This isn't so much a problem for English speakers. We see the URLs as the ASCII characters but eventually ICANN decided to approve punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... so we could have URLs in other character sets. The problem is that there are hundreds of character sets and many of these have characters that are visually difficult to distinguish. So now I can have two URLs that might actually be displayed identically in my browser that are actually different. I'm not 100% sure how this could have been avoided. It sucks for the non-english world. It could however have been mitigated if CAs check for URLs that are visually similar to existing URLs and not sign the certs for the new requests. With Certificate Transparency their is no excuse to not have a list of all valid signed URLs.
Meng Wanzhou has been arrested and is facing an extradition hearing in a Canadian court. The courts are part of the judiciary. John McCallum was literally the voice of the Canadian government in China. The government can never give its opinion on an individual's ongoing case while it is before the courts. I think after McCallum's first comments it was assumed he would either resign or at least apologize. The fact that he gave another opinion on the case is completely outrageous and shows McCallum to be completely ill suited to be an ambassador or to work in any capacity as part of the government. The Canadian prime minister is going to get grilled on this issue for not having fired McCallum sooner.
Note it doesn't matter if McCallum's statements are true, false, or just his personal opinion. The fact that he is the Canadian Ambassador to China means he can't say those things.
We get upset at CEOs who only care about the next quarters profits but as a species we rarely look ahead more than a year. Case in point everyone knew the Grand-banks fisheries off Canada's east coast were on the verge of collapse and yet we fished them right up to the point of nearly wiping out the cod there. Canadians dump more than 22 tons of GHG per person into the atmosphere (and BTW that's not counting the rotting pine forests). We beat the Americans by over 10% and yet we are doing almost nothing. If you can't get a well educated population that actually thinks climate change is a problem to change their ways there is no hope.
This is a job that is 99% matching symptoms to diseases and then looking up the cure. And the good thing about AI would be that they would actually learn from their mistakes instead of burying them. (I'm only half joking, the feed back mechanism for many doctors is limited or too slow to result in significant learning)
Hydrogen is a way of storing energy the same as a battery. Today batteries are better in every possible way except possibly air travel. Hydrogen is dangerous, hard to store and hard to transport. Again, except possibly for air travel, hydrogen is either expensive or less efficient to turn back into mechanical energy.
Up until 5 years ago I could make an open source project and make money off it by providing services. Engineering liked this because they felt safe that they weren't locked into a single vendor who might go bankrupt. Accounting liked the word free even if the service costs eventually cost more. The model seemed good for everyone.
Then came AWS. The software users are willing to pay for something they feel is tangible, computing time, storage and support. AWS is amazing for all three but then AWS became the support for the open source projects. The end customer started paying AWS for support and not the companies developing the open source project. Also AWS support is far better than what any single open source company can offer. The open source financing model for things like MongoDB went from workable to impossible in just a few years.
I place a value on each type and the requirement to win the war with the lowest cost. My soldiers cost w, my civilians are x, their civilians are y and their soldiers are z. w>x>y>z. The only thing that I see that is a problem is most politicians or bureaucrats will set w=x=MAX_INT, y=z=0. That's not an AI problem at all but a fundamental problem in democracies.
This is a key agreement scheme for privacy. Someone wants to keep something secret forever. Today Alice and Bob can use regular encryption to prove they are talking to each other and agree on a secret key using certificates and things like Diffie-Hellman key exchange. We have know how to do this for almost 40 years. The problem with all of this though is that if someone records the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (or other key agreement scheme) and the subsequent communication and computing or math advances in the future to the point where the D-H key exchange can be broken then the communication will no longer be secret. Now if you are the government, communication you do today could be very embarrassing if it was revealed 20 or 30 years from now.
Right now we are back to suitcases with key tables. If an embassy wants to send something that must be kept secret for 50 years, it pretty much has to be physically delivered or the keys for the communication must be physically delivered. Everyone is recording as much communication as they can and trying to build a quantum computer to break the key exchanges. Who will be first? The Americans, the Chinese, the University of Waterloo with money from everyone else???
QKD is simple to understand, I send you a bunch of pulses of photons, you send me back the way you read them, I send you a list of the times you read them the correct way. We now have a subset of photons that we correctly exchanged that we can use as a key. Does it work? As others have pointed out, it only really works if you only send 1 photon at a time. It fails if I send lots of photons each time (which I really need to do) and our attacker has better equipment than we do (which they always will because they get to build theirs after we commit and deploy).
Wish I had know this. I was employee number one at a company and let go the day my patents were approved.
The trouble is that it used to be expensive to have 51% of the computing power because of all the hardware you would have to buy. That is no longer true. Now I can rent the computing power to have 51% computing power for the length of the confirmation period. Here is a link https://www.crypto51.app/ to the cost to rent so much computing power and the percentage of the required computing power you can rent. You will notice that as of January 8th you could rent 102% of the computing power to launch a 51% attack on Etherium classic and it would only cost you $4700
There are 2 big reasons for residential batteries increase emissions. Politics and stupidity, the stupidity I see already in the comments. It will always be economical with people to share generation and storage of electricity. The more people and the further spread out geographically the better. You can form small groups for local management and then larger groups to spread out differences in local demand, weather and generation. Let's call the local groups utilities and the larger group a grid. You can set up solar panes on your roof and buy and sell the electricity to the utility. The utility can then sell or buy from any other utility in the grid. The utility can also have its own local storage to reduce transporting between utilities and also reduce infrastructure locally. Next we need to have the same pricing structure between all players. So when base load nuclear, wind and solar are all producing at their maximums the price can go to zero and when it's a hot cloudy summer afternoon with no wind the price can go to $10/kwh. One bonus of allowing the price to swing like this is that consumers will change their behaviour. Storing electricity is hard, changing behaviour is easy if you have the political will.
I worked on a very large pilot in Oklahoma. We everyone two pricing options and they paid the lower one at the end of the month. The first was the current system of 12 to 20 cents per kwh. The second was peak prices of $0.78 and the lowest price was free. Average savings per month was $50. Savings for the utility would have been double that. The reason for the huge savings to the utility is it would have reduced the utilities peak demand. Over 10% of a utilities infrastructure is used for only hours a year. Eliminate that peak and you save the utility tens of billions of dollars. The pilot was an amazing success. The regulator of the utility then went and fucked the entire thing up so badly that they pretty much killed the idea for all of North America. Oh, and the politicians all patted themselves on the back for preventing an evil utility from making huge profits. If Oklahoma and Gas and Electric had rolled out the concept for everyone in the state their profits under their new regulated prices would have dropped.
Why the fuck would anyone live in a neighbourhood where you have to lock your door or worry about stuff being stolen in your yard? If you live somewhere that dangerous and read slash dot I'm guessing you can afford to move to a first world nation.
When I lived most of the workers were essentially migrant workers. We got paid a lot but no one intends to stay. My experience with a family of 4, our costs went up 50% (150K to 230K) and our cost of living went up 60% (40K to 65K). But our after tax savings went from 60K to 95K. That's pretty significant for a young family. The healthcare there was far better than in Ontario and the public schools (if you choose the right ones) are amazing. Weather is unbearable if you happen to be a family of red heads though.
Cancer kills an individual creature. Even if 90% of a species is killed by cancer most species would bounce back. However a mutation that made all of an individuals off spring a single sex would lead to extinction of most species. Our genome is full of defenses against these types of mutations and the genomes of more than a few species are littered with the scares of near misses.
I had a job where we had a voluntary salary reduction of 20% and got one day a week off for 6 months. In Canada, a company has to offer you a choice to accept such a cut and give you severance if you don't. If you don't have a job to go to you have no real choice but to accept the cut but immediately started looking for a new job. I waited till the end of the 6 months for my current company to communicate what they intended to do with the 20% cut. This time if they repeated the 20% offer I was taking the severance. The day the 6 month reduction finished came and went and the company didn't say anything. I wasn't going to say anything and weaken my position with respect to the severance. I wanted a written offer for the extension of the 20% reduction that I could refuse. In the end time ran out. I was starting the new job on the Monday and it was Friday afternoon when I quit.
I'm surprised no one complained about interviewing for government jobs where they already know who they want to hire but are going through the motion to follow show it was a competitive process.
When we increased the efficiency of burning coal guess what, we used more. That can be said about a huge number of other things we consume. As we increase the efficiency the usefulness tends to increase significantly faster that the efficiency gain. So we have more efficient engines now, the result has been moving from driving a car to an SUV. Then we drive the SUV even further. If the ICE cars become less efficient then the cost advantage of electric cars will actually increase to the point no one will buy a new ICE car.
This is so stupid for the oil industry to push it's either fake news or the oil industry has really lost anyone who has half a brain and all that's left is stupid psychopaths.
I'm willing to bet there was never any intention to arrest her. She broke an American law and someone at the DoJ just went through the motion of getting the arrest warrant for her. They never thought it would be acted on as she wasn't going to come to the USA. They failed to realize that the extradition treaty with Canada bound the RCMP to arrest her. I suspect there is a lot more wiggle room in the USA on acting on arrest warrants than there is in Canada.
I'm not saying the currencies are safe against active attackers, or people wishing to just mess with the block chain, this is just about privacy and scanning the block chain.
Assuming we can create a secure hash function and people use truly random numbers then the ring signatures used in Monero are secure in that they reveal no knowledge about who signed the message. Anyone of the private keys associated with the public keys could have been the signer. Your next option would be to try and track transaction inputs and outputs but even these permit any possible value. So just looking at the block chain, even if you have a quantum computer and can solve the discrete log problem (DLP), you aren't going to learn much. As an active attacker, one who is creating outputs that they hope their intended victim will then use as inputs, and again possessing a way to solve DLP, maybe but you will have to solve one DLP for every attack. There might be a way to double spend many times if you could solve the DLP once. That's because you could solve a relation between two generators of the elliptic curve group used by RCTTypeFull, but that exploit will likely be closed before anyone develops a working quantum computer large enough to attack Ed25519.
Further reading:
https://www.getmonero.org/libr...
Zcash uses a different group membership algorithm. It could be broken if you had a quantum computer, but again you have to solve either the DLP or RSA problem for each transaction you wish to investigate. It will be years before that computing power is feasible to spend on one transaction.
There are no good resources, that I would recommend, for Zcash and other zero coin derivatives.
And crypto currencies. If you choose to ignore the two biggest uses today then I wonder how many others they "missed" https://www.certificate-transp...
Moore's law hit an economic wall not a physical one. The cost of R&D and of fab plants has also been growing exponentially, doubling every 30 months. The market for chips also grew quite a lot in the last 45 years. However not nearly as fast as the cost of fabrication. So what we saw was less and less fab plants on the leading edge. We are now down to two companies pushing the envelope for large complex processors and it looks like one (Intel) is going to take a small pause.
The suburbs and rural living kill you now. Both are completely car dependent now. That wasn't true 30 years ago. New subdivisions are designed so that you do all your shopping in big box stores. You don't walk anywhere and you barely even talk to your neighbours. It would make most kids suicidal or drug addicts. The rural areas lost their youth to cities, their local stores to the big box stores and their sense of community. The USA might claim an unemployment of under 4% but a better number to look at is the work force participation rate for white males between 20 and 44. It's only 83%. That's abysmal. The USA is getting very sticky as far as moving. New immigrants are willing to move for work but existing people in rural areas are not. As a result many have given up on finding work so they don't count as unemployed. We need to change our urban planning so people can live in cities and be neighbours again. Otherwise more of us will be going to the funerals of our children.