Everybody's got some stupid, archaic social dysfunction to overcome. But against India's caste problems and endemic poverty you have to set sheer size: 1.2 billion, almost a fifth of the world's population. India can hit well below its weight and still pack a punch. If India were the size of, say Germany -- eighty million -- it'd be an economic and technological nobody. But size does count.
The sheer size of the US (we're the third most populous country in the world) means we aren't going to go away. But we do face the question of whether we want to hit above our weight, as Germany does and we did in the past, or below our weight, as India does.
Germany is worth looking into. It has about 1% of population of the Earth, but that 1% has a massively oversized tech footprint. Perhaps because it has almost 10% of the top 200 universities in the world. Which cost about a hundred bucks a semester to attend. These facts are very likely NOT unrelated.
That would be Russia. You know, the country that beat the US in most space milestones, yet is somehow lacking in all those supposed space spinoffs.
Well, you mean the Soviet Union. At its peak the Soviet Union had about the same population as the US has now: 293 vs. 319 million. Russia currently has a population of 143 million -- still a big country, but laboring under both a smaller population, smaller per capita wealth, and a system that funnels that bulk of that wealth to a small number of kleptocrats.
The thing that makes the difference in any technology race is human capital. You need large numbers of people, and you have to make good use of them. Hundreds of millions of uneducated peasants or unskilled laborers adds nothing to a country's technological might.
What made the US a powerhouse in the middle twentieth century was a large, educated middle class. Sure, Singaporeans are better educated than we are, and it shows in their outsized tech footprint for their population; but that population is only five million. The country to watch is India, which has a middle class larger than the US middle class. And it's the middle class you want to pay attention to, because there's where you have the combination of education and numbers necessary to be a tech innovator. When it comes to brains you need BOTH sheer numbers AND quality.
Unfortunately the US middle class isn't what it used to be. In 1968, we had a GINI coefficient of 38.6. GINI is a measure of income inequality; that would put us roughly in the neighborhood of Japan today. As of the last available data US GINI was approaching 48 and still climbing rapidly. That puts us in the neighborhood of Mexico, heading for Zimbabwe territory. Even Russia has more economic equality than we currently do.
It's not inequality per se that's the problem. There is nothing inherently bad about rich people having lots of money. In fact all other things being equal that's a good thing. But if you want a middle class family to put even one of its on average 3 children through a four year engineering degree, that family is going to have to come up with a lot of dough. The total costs of a four year STEM degree is $180k, and the median household income is just a hair over $50k. And while there is considerable public and private support, the cost of higher education has risen over the past thirty years while middle class incomes have stagnated. Income stagnation wouldn't make any difference if prices stagnated too, but they haven't. Some things like TVs and cars have got cheaper in real terms, but other things like education and health care have risen faster than inflation. People are getting priced out of the education market, and that reduces the net size of our national tech brain power.
If we want to remain a world leader in technology and science, we need to maintain and support the army of brains it will take to make that happen. In the 60s there was a distinct understanding that this undertaking was a national priority. Americans today take tech leadership as some kind of birthright, which it is not. That means we have to expect to fall behind India, China, and whatever kind of European Common Market remains after Brexit.
Somebody should have warned us that something like this was possible.
I mean, clearly if it had been known this was even a possibility, management would have taken effective action to prevent it.
Because people are rational beings who make logical decisions. I learned that in Economics class and if that's not true then the very principles our society is founded upon would be nothing more than wishful thinking.
Look in a copy of CR magazine. Notice what's missing? Advertisements. Same with the website.
Also Consumer's Union is a non-profit which publishes its financial statements. The income statement is particularly simple in that operating revenue comes from the following sources: subscriptions, newsstand sales, tax-deductable grants, and interest.
Really? I had to mainboard go bad on my Vizio TV. When the guy showed up and popped the back off I was astonished to find the mainboard was simply stuck to the back of the LCD panel with packing tape.
People clearly misunderstand this because they keep saying things like "Scientists used to believe X, but now they believe Y," as proof that scientists don't have the capital-T Truth. And they're right. They're just missing the point. The problem with Truth is that it's inaccessible. Unless you're God, you're missing big parts of it. Mortals don't have the Truth, we only have evidence, and not all the evidence there is.
So you have to decide what is the best basis for making decisions that affect society as a whole, the one that appeals to your gut feelings about the Truth, or the one supported by the best evidence we have so far. Sure evidence based policy means you have to change your mind sometimes; but not knowing everything isn't the moral equivalent of knowing nothing.
As for "consensus", well, that's not what people think it is either. It's not a declaration of truth, it's a general agreement as to where the burden of proof lies. If you want to claim that humans hunted T. Rex you're going to need very strong evidence to back that up. Someone who claims T. Rex was extinct before humans doesn't need to back that up at all. It's discrimiantion, but it's fair and reasonable discrimination. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
It doesn't matter what a scientist believes, it only matters what he can prove. That's why it's a bad idea to go shopping for a scientist who believes what you want to be true: chances are you'll find one. Science used this way has no probative value. Of course you can argue against the scientific consensus as a basis for public policy if you want, but to show that that is rational you'll need to provide justification for why your preferred scientist is right, and that means seriously studying the field so you can mount the same kind of technical critique of evidence that a professional in the field could. Otherwise you're just scientist shopping.
The opinion of the overwhelming majority of experts working in the field may not be God's-own-Truth, but it's the best starting place for policy. It has at least the benefit that it can't tell you whatever you want to hear.
In fact from the mid 40s to around around 1980 there actually was a slight decrease in measured temperature at surface stations around the globe, although not to early 20th C levels. This was due to the rise of SO2 above many of the temperature stations, which reduced sunlight reaching the surface. You probably aren't old enough to remember, but this is what cities often looked like in the 60s.
So in the mid 60s the future direction of climate was still somewhat open. On one hand increasing CO2 (by then measurable) was warming the Earth; on the other natural variations in the Earth's orbit and increased SO2 would have a cooling effect. The question was which effect would prevail. By the mid 70s the vast majority of papers concluded that the balance would tip toward warming, successfully predicting the warming seen after 1980 before it actually happened. Of course public understanding of the current state of science is usually a decade or more out of date. In the case of AGW, almost nobody outside of Earth Sciences was aware of the newly emerged consensus until An Incovenient Truth came out -- which left people feeling blindsided. But you can go back in Google Scholar and watch that consensus emerge some thirty years earlier. I was aware of it in the 80s because I'd married a geophysicist.
As for peak oil that's a much tougher nut to crack because it depends on predictions of future oil recovery technologies and the discovery of future energy reserves. If technology hadn't improved since the 1970s we'd surely be looking at much more expensive petroleum. Economists have never predicted we'll "run out of oil", by the way, because that's not how markets work. What will happen is oil will someday become too expensive to use to power things like cars. We're still headed there eventually, but nobody can say exactly when.
Oh, I agree. Cooking can be complicated, but only if you want it to be. Julia Child's recipes are amazing, but insanely complicated. Mark Bittman's recipes on the other hand are simple, fun and reliable -- I just bought his beginner cookbook for my college student daughter and she is thrilled to be making delicious food from scratch instead of instant ramen.
I grew up in a restaurant family and I love to go out to eat, but I can't wrap my brain around people ordering something like hamburgers. Stuff that's easy make and don't involve a lot of clean-up. For the price of a bad hamburger you could be eating steak. Or a good hamburger. Olive Garden is a major head-scratcher. The food is shockingly unappetizing or in some cases downright bizarre. It reminds me of the TOS episode The Menagerie where the Talosians tried to put the girl back together after the crash but had no idea what she was supposed to look like.
Straw man. A business doesn't have to be admirable, it has to obey the law, both statutory and common. You might not respect women who choose to enter the industry; you might think that is an extremely foolish thing to do. You might even be right. But you don't get to judge for them; they're the only people qualified to judge their own financial need against the costs. But of course when you're committing fraud, you're taking away their right to judge for themselves by force of deception.
Now people trick other people into having sex all the time. It's always reprehensible, but it's not always criminal. But just because it's sometimes legal doesn't mean it's always legal. When the proposition is presented as a business arrangement, you are obligated to deliver the thing promised.
It was evident that one of the most popular subject within the Usenet were the trading of recipes. Something I never expected, the popularity and the amounts (recipes) available in that area were just vast.
It's not so surprising if you think of it as a kind of porn.
Surveys show that almost 1/3 of Americans don't know how to cook. And this more shocking given that the bar for what constitutes "cooking" has been dropping. When I learned to cook one of the first things I learned was to bone a chicken -- something admittedly I haven't done in twenty years. My grandparents generation would have learned how pluck a chicken. Today buying a seasoned chicken breast and throwing it in the oven is "cooking".
I go to the supermarket and produce and meat sections have shrunk to make room for burgeoning frozen and microwave convenience foods. We are a country where you can literally buy frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
And yet at the same time cable TV is choked with cooking "reality" shows and how-to shows where food which is prepared that it is a fair bet that not one in a hundred viewers would attempt. I'd lay even odds that not one in thousand on some of the recipes. And the number of cookbooks that are published have gone up by 50% since 2002.
The inevitable conclusion is that there is a growing body of people who read about cooking, watch shows about cooking, but do not cook themselves.
It used to be a setting in SYSTEM.INI; back in the NT4 days you got BSOD so frequently it was worth changing the color just to add a little variety to your day.
It probably still is in SYSTEM.INI; I'd check but it's been years since I've had a Windows machine.
For what it's worth I think liberals can get taken in by false news too, it's just that this guy doesn't have the ear for it. It's like trying to cross over from country to jazz. This guy just doesn't know how to hit the note that triggers the fight or flight response in liberals.
That said, it's the conservative movement's historical turn to suffer from arrogance-induced head-rot, as the liberal movement has had at times in the past. A society requires a tension between its liberal and conservative impulses, and what we're looking at is the US conservative movement losing coherency from having the upper hand for so long. Evidence: the incoming president from the conservative party isn't conservative at all. He's more like a cancer in the conservative movement.
Now Bob Dole -- there was a real conservative; arguably the last real conservative Republican nomoinee to run as a conservative. Mitt Romney had to cater to the elements in the Republican party, but he'd likely have governed as an establishment conservative. But to lay claim to being conservative, you have to be consistent enough in your vision to have something to conserve.
As usual the idiots haven't even bothered to read the summary.
According to the Czech interior ministry, its new unit won't be interrogating anyone, censoring online content or bringing legal proceedings, nor will it "have a button for 'switching off the internet.'" But it will monitor threats, inform the public about "serious cases of disinformation" and promote internal security expertise.
Back in the day we were writing more challenging programs than "Hello, World!". I personally wrote custom parsers, real-time control software (on a PDP/11 running RSTS/E), a numerous problems requiring serious algorithm design. A lot of what I did would be easy to do today because of a combination of computing power, rich libraries, and scripting languages, but doing it all yourself in C with nothing but the (then much smaller) standard library made it pretty interesting.
The big difference is how much closer you felt to the bare iron back in the day. Today we work in the context largely of other peoples' frameworks and libraries. If I had to draw an analogy it'd be like voting in a town meeting in a small frontier town, and voting as a citizen in a republic with a hundred million citizens. In which case do you have the most power? It's not a straightforward question. In a small town you can shape policy in a way you can't in large republic, but you're limited by the limitations of that town itself. You can vote to put a man on the Moon, but it's not going to happen.
The important thing to realize is that as you get older, you just don't have as much fun, pretty much across the board. You have to cultivate playfulness because it doesn't come as naturally as it once did. When I hear people middle aged or older (like myself) pining for a lost past, it's often clear to me that what they're mourning is the loss of their youth.
Declining SAT scores were a big topic of discussion in the 80s and 90s, but what most people never really took into account was that in the 50s most jobs only required a high school diploma; by the 80s more people felt they needed to have a college degree. The decline in scores didn't reflect a decline in ability of graduating high schoolers, it reflected more of the lower-performing graduates taking the test.
I've been in the computing field for a long time. When I went into it back in the early 80s most people had never seen a computer. There were a very small number of people who worked with computers, and I'd say about half of them were doing at least moderately interesting stuff. Today there are many many more people doing interesting stuff, it's just that the growth in interesting work has been swamped by a rising ocean of mindless, bureaucratic IT drone work.
"Lightly customized?" I'm pretty sure that's colloquially known as "pirated".
Well... if "pirated" means "illegally copied and distributed", that verb doesn't apply in this case.
Wikipedia has a conventient list of countries showing when they became signatories to various intellectual property treaties. Note the entry for "Korea, Democratic People's Republic of".
There is no international law that requires countries to honor arrangements established by treaties they haven't signed, or to respect legal monopolies granted by other countries. So what North Korea has done is perfectly legal both by its own laws and by international law. It may be sleazy, but it hardly makes the hit parade of North Korean atrocities.
Slashdot Mirror
And we have... "race".
Everybody's got some stupid, archaic social dysfunction to overcome. But against India's caste problems and endemic poverty you have to set sheer size: 1.2 billion, almost a fifth of the world's population. India can hit well below its weight and still pack a punch. If India were the size of, say Germany -- eighty million -- it'd be an economic and technological nobody. But size does count.
The sheer size of the US (we're the third most populous country in the world) means we aren't going to go away. But we do face the question of whether we want to hit above our weight, as Germany does and we did in the past, or below our weight, as India does.
Germany is worth looking into. It has about 1% of population of the Earth, but that 1% has a massively oversized tech footprint. Perhaps because it has almost 10% of the top 200 universities in the world. Which cost about a hundred bucks a semester to attend. These facts are very likely NOT unrelated.
The angelic choir, putting on a performance of Julius Caesar on an Aldiss Lamp.
Why so sarcastic?
[snip] As long as companies aren't held accountable for their lax security...
I think you just answered your own question.
That would be Russia. You know, the country that beat the US in most space milestones, yet is somehow lacking in all those supposed space spinoffs.
Well, you mean the Soviet Union. At its peak the Soviet Union had about the same population as the US has now: 293 vs. 319 million. Russia currently has a population of 143 million -- still a big country, but laboring under both a smaller population, smaller per capita wealth, and a system that funnels that bulk of that wealth to a small number of kleptocrats.
The thing that makes the difference in any technology race is human capital. You need large numbers of people, and you have to make good use of them. Hundreds of millions of uneducated peasants or unskilled laborers adds nothing to a country's technological might.
What made the US a powerhouse in the middle twentieth century was a large, educated middle class. Sure, Singaporeans are better educated than we are, and it shows in their outsized tech footprint for their population; but that population is only five million. The country to watch is India, which has a middle class larger than the US middle class. And it's the middle class you want to pay attention to, because there's where you have the combination of education and numbers necessary to be a tech innovator. When it comes to brains you need BOTH sheer numbers AND quality.
Unfortunately the US middle class isn't what it used to be. In 1968, we had a GINI coefficient of 38.6. GINI is a measure of income inequality; that would put us roughly in the neighborhood of Japan today. As of the last available data US GINI was approaching 48 and still climbing rapidly. That puts us in the neighborhood of Mexico, heading for Zimbabwe territory. Even Russia has more economic equality than we currently do.
It's not inequality per se that's the problem. There is nothing inherently bad about rich people having lots of money. In fact all other things being equal that's a good thing. But if you want a middle class family to put even one of its on average 3 children through a four year engineering degree, that family is going to have to come up with a lot of dough. The total costs of a four year STEM degree is $180k, and the median household income is just a hair over $50k. And while there is considerable public and private support, the cost of higher education has risen over the past thirty years while middle class incomes have stagnated. Income stagnation wouldn't make any difference if prices stagnated too, but they haven't. Some things like TVs and cars have got cheaper in real terms, but other things like education and health care have risen faster than inflation. People are getting priced out of the education market, and that reduces the net size of our national tech brain power.
If we want to remain a world leader in technology and science, we need to maintain and support the army of brains it will take to make that happen. In the 60s there was a distinct understanding that this undertaking was a national priority. Americans today take tech leadership as some kind of birthright, which it is not. That means we have to expect to fall behind India, China, and whatever kind of European Common Market remains after Brexit.
Somebody should have warned us that something like this was possible.
I mean, clearly if it had been known this was even a possibility, management would have taken effective action to prevent it.
Because people are rational beings who make logical decisions. I learned that in Economics class and if that's not true then the very principles our society is founded upon would be nothing more than wishful thinking.
Look in a copy of CR magazine. Notice what's missing? Advertisements. Same with the website.
Also Consumer's Union is a non-profit which publishes its financial statements. The income statement is particularly simple in that operating revenue comes from the following sources: subscriptions, newsstand sales, tax-deductable grants, and interest.
Really? I had to mainboard go bad on my Vizio TV. When the guy showed up and popped the back off I was astonished to find the mainboard was simply stuck to the back of the LCD panel with packing tape.
CR does not accept vendor payments, nor does it accept advertising.
At 62 I am always having fun, because I'm still breathing.
The secret to a long and happy life: set achievable standards for success.
Sadly many of my friends from the "good old days" have become bitter, drank/drugged themselves into major medical problems, or are dead.
Remember when it was weird when you heard about a computer guying dying? That was something only old people did.
Is yesteryear's world better or worse than today's? They are more alike than they are different.
Exactly. The thing about progress is, well, it is progress but that doesn't mean you don't give up some things to get it.
Next to the dumbbells... You'll know me, I got a hat.”
I guess not, then.
Well, it's easier to tip a working system between relatively equally matched candidates than it is an already rigged one.
It's about the best available evidence.
People clearly misunderstand this because they keep saying things like "Scientists used to believe X, but now they believe Y," as proof that scientists don't have the capital-T Truth. And they're right. They're just missing the point. The problem with Truth is that it's inaccessible. Unless you're God, you're missing big parts of it. Mortals don't have the Truth, we only have evidence, and not all the evidence there is.
So you have to decide what is the best basis for making decisions that affect society as a whole, the one that appeals to your gut feelings about the Truth, or the one supported by the best evidence we have so far. Sure evidence based policy means you have to change your mind sometimes; but not knowing everything isn't the moral equivalent of knowing nothing.
As for "consensus", well, that's not what people think it is either. It's not a declaration of truth, it's a general agreement as to where the burden of proof lies. If you want to claim that humans hunted T. Rex you're going to need very strong evidence to back that up. Someone who claims T. Rex was extinct before humans doesn't need to back that up at all. It's discrimiantion, but it's fair and reasonable discrimination. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
It doesn't matter what a scientist believes, it only matters what he can prove. That's why it's a bad idea to go shopping for a scientist who believes what you want to be true: chances are you'll find one. Science used this way has no probative value. Of course you can argue against the scientific consensus as a basis for public policy if you want, but to show that that is rational you'll need to provide justification for why your preferred scientist is right, and that means seriously studying the field so you can mount the same kind of technical critique of evidence that a professional in the field could. Otherwise you're just scientist shopping.
The opinion of the overwhelming majority of experts working in the field may not be God's-own-Truth, but it's the best starting place for policy. It has at least the benefit that it can't tell you whatever you want to hear.
In fact from the mid 40s to around around 1980 there actually was a slight decrease in measured temperature at surface stations around the globe, although not to early 20th C levels. This was due to the rise of SO2 above many of the temperature stations, which reduced sunlight reaching the surface. You probably aren't old enough to remember, but this is what cities often looked like in the 60s.
So in the mid 60s the future direction of climate was still somewhat open. On one hand increasing CO2 (by then measurable) was warming the Earth; on the other natural variations in the Earth's orbit and increased SO2 would have a cooling effect. The question was which effect would prevail. By the mid 70s the vast majority of papers concluded that the balance would tip toward warming, successfully predicting the warming seen after 1980 before it actually happened. Of course public understanding of the current state of science is usually a decade or more out of date. In the case of AGW, almost nobody outside of Earth Sciences was aware of the newly emerged consensus until An Incovenient Truth came out -- which left people feeling blindsided. But you can go back in Google Scholar and watch that consensus emerge some thirty years earlier. I was aware of it in the 80s because I'd married a geophysicist.
As for peak oil that's a much tougher nut to crack because it depends on predictions of future oil recovery technologies and the discovery of future energy reserves. If technology hadn't improved since the 1970s we'd surely be looking at much more expensive petroleum. Economists have never predicted we'll "run out of oil", by the way, because that's not how markets work. What will happen is oil will someday become too expensive to use to power things like cars. We're still headed there eventually, but nobody can say exactly when.
Oh, I agree. Cooking can be complicated, but only if you want it to be. Julia Child's recipes are amazing, but insanely complicated. Mark Bittman's recipes on the other hand are simple, fun and reliable -- I just bought his beginner cookbook for my college student daughter and she is thrilled to be making delicious food from scratch instead of instant ramen.
I grew up in a restaurant family and I love to go out to eat, but I can't wrap my brain around people ordering something like hamburgers. Stuff that's easy make and don't involve a lot of clean-up. For the price of a bad hamburger you could be eating steak. Or a good hamburger. Olive Garden is a major head-scratcher. The food is shockingly unappetizing or in some cases downright bizarre. It reminds me of the TOS episode The Menagerie where the Talosians tried to put the girl back together after the crash but had no idea what she was supposed to look like.
Sometimes yes. But either way your opinion of someone is irrelevant. Even if you don't respect a person you are obliged to respect their rights.
Straw man. A business doesn't have to be admirable, it has to obey the law, both statutory and common. You might not respect women who choose to enter the industry; you might think that is an extremely foolish thing to do. You might even be right. But you don't get to judge for them; they're the only people qualified to judge their own financial need against the costs. But of course when you're committing fraud, you're taking away their right to judge for themselves by force of deception.
Now people trick other people into having sex all the time. It's always reprehensible, but it's not always criminal. But just because it's sometimes legal doesn't mean it's always legal. When the proposition is presented as a business arrangement, you are obligated to deliver the thing promised.
Not so cool in my opinion. When you get something of value in return for false promises it's fraud, even if it is fun for you.
This is not a victimless crime.
It was evident that one of the most popular subject within the Usenet were the trading of recipes. Something I never expected, the popularity and the amounts (recipes) available in that area were just vast.
It's not so surprising if you think of it as a kind of porn.
Surveys show that almost 1/3 of Americans don't know how to cook. And this more shocking given that the bar for what constitutes "cooking" has been dropping. When I learned to cook one of the first things I learned was to bone a chicken -- something admittedly I haven't done in twenty years. My grandparents generation would have learned how pluck a chicken. Today buying a seasoned chicken breast and throwing it in the oven is "cooking".
I go to the supermarket and produce and meat sections have shrunk to make room for burgeoning frozen and microwave convenience foods. We are a country where you can literally buy frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
And yet at the same time cable TV is choked with cooking "reality" shows and how-to shows where food which is prepared that it is a fair bet that not one in a hundred viewers would attempt. I'd lay even odds that not one in thousand on some of the recipes. And the number of cookbooks that are published have gone up by 50% since 2002.
The inevitable conclusion is that there is a growing body of people who read about cooking, watch shows about cooking, but do not cook themselves.
It used to be a setting in SYSTEM.INI; back in the NT4 days you got BSOD so frequently it was worth changing the color just to add a little variety to your day.
It probably still is in SYSTEM.INI; I'd check but it's been years since I've had a Windows machine.
For what it's worth I think liberals can get taken in by false news too, it's just that this guy doesn't have the ear for it. It's like trying to cross over from country to jazz. This guy just doesn't know how to hit the note that triggers the fight or flight response in liberals.
That said, it's the conservative movement's historical turn to suffer from arrogance-induced head-rot, as the liberal movement has had at times in the past. A society requires a tension between its liberal and conservative impulses, and what we're looking at is the US conservative movement losing coherency from having the upper hand for so long. Evidence: the incoming president from the conservative party isn't conservative at all. He's more like a cancer in the conservative movement.
Now Bob Dole -- there was a real conservative; arguably the last real conservative Republican nomoinee to run as a conservative. Mitt Romney had to cater to the elements in the Republican party, but he'd likely have governed as an establishment conservative. But to lay claim to being conservative, you have to be consistent enough in your vision to have something to conserve.
As usual the idiots haven't even bothered to read the summary.
According to the Czech interior ministry, its new unit won't be interrogating anyone, censoring online content or bringing legal proceedings, nor will it "have a button for 'switching off the internet.'" But it will monitor threats, inform the public about "serious cases of disinformation" and promote internal security expertise.
It's the lack of principle of the thing.
Back in the day we were writing more challenging programs than "Hello, World!". I personally wrote custom parsers, real-time control software (on a PDP/11 running RSTS/E), a numerous problems requiring serious algorithm design. A lot of what I did would be easy to do today because of a combination of computing power, rich libraries, and scripting languages, but doing it all yourself in C with nothing but the (then much smaller) standard library made it pretty interesting.
The big difference is how much closer you felt to the bare iron back in the day. Today we work in the context largely of other peoples' frameworks and libraries. If I had to draw an analogy it'd be like voting in a town meeting in a small frontier town, and voting as a citizen in a republic with a hundred million citizens. In which case do you have the most power? It's not a straightforward question. In a small town you can shape policy in a way you can't in large republic, but you're limited by the limitations of that town itself. You can vote to put a man on the Moon, but it's not going to happen.
The important thing to realize is that as you get older, you just don't have as much fun, pretty much across the board. You have to cultivate playfulness because it doesn't come as naturally as it once did. When I hear people middle aged or older (like myself) pining for a lost past, it's often clear to me that what they're mourning is the loss of their youth.
Declining SAT scores were a big topic of discussion in the 80s and 90s, but what most people never really took into account was that in the 50s most jobs only required a high school diploma; by the 80s more people felt they needed to have a college degree. The decline in scores didn't reflect a decline in ability of graduating high schoolers, it reflected more of the lower-performing graduates taking the test.
I've been in the computing field for a long time. When I went into it back in the early 80s most people had never seen a computer. There were a very small number of people who worked with computers, and I'd say about half of them were doing at least moderately interesting stuff. Today there are many many more people doing interesting stuff, it's just that the growth in interesting work has been swamped by a rising ocean of mindless, bureaucratic IT drone work.
"Lightly customized?" I'm pretty sure that's colloquially known as "pirated".
Well... if "pirated" means "illegally copied and distributed", that verb doesn't apply in this case.
Wikipedia has a conventient list of countries showing when they became signatories to various intellectual property treaties. Note the entry for "Korea, Democratic People's Republic of".
There is no international law that requires countries to honor arrangements established by treaties they haven't signed, or to respect legal monopolies granted by other countries. So what North Korea has done is perfectly legal both by its own laws and by international law. It may be sleazy, but it hardly makes the hit parade of North Korean atrocities.