Fair in the sense that it was unclear which side would win the war.

Compare the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war, where it was entirely predictable that the coalition and the US (respectively) would substantially "win" in a matter of weeks (though the problems with a long drawn-out occupation are well-documented).

No, it's a revenue earner once sold. It's extremely unlikely that a factory at 0.01% production capacity can ever produce a profit -- and if it can, it means that demand so outstips supply that it is probably critical to society that we get that factory up to near 100%.

You can never realistically operate a business without this understanding, not under any economic system.

So wait, you want people to be employed variably? Nobody is going to sign up to be an employee at a random 0.01% of the time. Yes, there are fields of variable employment, but they are limited.

It absolutely is. What do you think "wasted" means?

Even aside from inefficient use of resources, it costs money to hold the land for the factory (and land costs aren't artificial costs -- you get to use the land because *nobody else does*), and basically everything needs maintenance eventually or it will fall apart. Security to prevent people from stealing all your shit (although in this case, the economy would probably be better off if somebody stole it from a 0.01% production factory and used it in a 10% production factory, making 1000x as many widgets).

I don't know why loss is in quotes here. Again, it's not just the owner's money that's wasted. All the resources invested into producing widgets are being used inefficiently.

There's lots of things we can say about the "dismal science" that I'd agree with, but this is not just economist talk, and things are not wrong simply because economists say this. It's accountant talk, business administration talk, and reality talk.

That sounds unlikely...at 3 days, that comes out to under $42k, and at 4 days it comes out to just over $31k. 42k would be low for an entry-level video game developer in a low cost of living area even as just a salary. But a common rule of thumb is to take salary * 2 as an employee's total cost. $31k would be nearly unheard of -- only an indie title.

This particular team has membership in the US, Canada, and the UK, and is done by remote work, so it might not actually cost them salary * 2 since office space is an enormous part of that. Still, I'd be shocked if anybody made that little, except maybe a summer intern.

I'd expect the average all salary to be in the low 6 figures, and certainly the all-in cost to be around there.

And all of this is angels on the head of a pin, because even 4 days' salary is small unless you can replace what that thing is doing in less than 4 days (or use half the team to replace it in 8 days, etc.).

Because you don't know there's absolutely nothing to do to prevent it unless you think about the problem and fail to find a solution.

Robots.

Remember, the entire premise here is that robots are displacing jobs. If we have a job -- grow basic food and build basic housing -- and a robot is NOT doing it, then there's a job for humans to do, so we don't have a problem.

Ipso facto, if there's no jobs for humans left, then we can just take from robots.

There's selection bias in a couple ways...

I think you're talking about people who self-report IQs being the ones with high IQs, and having large absolute numbers.

There's another selection bias to compound there, where they take the IQ test that gave them the best score. These IQ tests, of course, tend to be free Internet tests of dubious provenance.

Then there's exaggerations, and then people who confuse a non-IQ test with an IQ test, and then outright fabrications.

It's basically impossible to evaluate the proportion of each. Note that self-reported penis length and total height (in males) is also significantly higher than actual averages, even if you start with a random sampling, and even if you tell men it's anonymous. There are also big psychological jump at 6' tall. Wouldn't be surprised if penis length had something similar around 6".

By the way, I have an IQ of like a billion or something, and did very well academically because apparently my sheer hypergenius wrapped around again to getting good marks.

The loss isn't on one device, it's on a series of devices in two different product lines (RT and Pro). The Surface Pro 3 is a particular device in a particular line. You can't just get the 1.7 billion back on the previous products by cutting the newest device. There isn't enough data here to make a call on whether Microsoft should "pull the plug on the tablet" because we don't have any idea whether the new one makes money, nor any way to extrapolate from the spotty old data.

What we can notice is the conspicuous absence of a Surface RT 3 -- it appears like the RT line was a big anchor and is being cut loose, and the Pro line may be legitimately successful. The Pro line was generally praised by reviewers. The RT line...not so much.

Computational speed is a form of efficiency. The right balance between CPU, memory, bus, network, disk, battery, user responsiveness, etc. is a tricky multivariable problem that does not have a unique general solution.

The argument here is not about large solar power plants, it's about small-scale decentralized power generation.

What she's saying is that there is no known practical test which requires string theory as an explanation -- the other theories are sufficient. That doesn't contradict the idea that there are tests which could disprove string theory.

Consider the claim that a man who stands before you was created just outside your front door 5 minutes ago, fully formed with enough knowledge to communicate and a local accent, etc., but no evidence of any prior existence was created along with him. Your alternative explanation is that he's lying and was born 30 years ago, as his appearance suggests. You could disprove his theory by finding his house with pictures of him growing up -- that's prior evidence of his existence. It's extraordinarily doubtful that you could ever prove his claim, even if it were true -- it's just much more likely by virtue of simplicity that he was born and you can't find evidence of where he grew up prior to 5 minutes ago, because there's certainly no less evidence of that.

It's not enough for a theory to stand up to attempts to disprove it -- that's a necessary but insufficient condition. It also has to explain something, anything, in a way that is either simpler or more complete than other known theories.

Newton's Laws stand up because they are simpler but less complete than theories like relativity. Relativity stands up because it is more complete than Newton's Laws -- there are known situations when Newton's Laws simply give the wrong answer and relativity gives the right one. QM stands up because it explains something that relativity does not, so it's more complete in a different sense. Aristotelian cosmology failed because it was simply wrong. Geocentrism failed not because it was "wrong" (a geocentric frame of reference is a perfectly valid, albeit non-inertial, frame of reference, and you can absolutely make accurate calculations about the universe with Earth defined as its geometric center), but because it was incredibly complicated compared to heliocentrism and provided no discernible scientific benefits. That leads to the question: is string theory like geocentrism, in that it's not strictly disproven but it's an unnecessary pain in the ass?

The request here would be for a situation that String Theory explains, and QM and Relativity either do not explain, or explain inaccurately, or explain in a more complicated fashion. It's useless until it provides one of those things, other than the joy of pure mathematics. Science does not state "all proposed theories are true until disproven" -- rather, it says "don't assume a proposed theory is true until you fail to either disprove it, or come up with an easier answer".

I'm not personally in a good position to evaluate the merits of string theory anymore, and neither is anybody with merely the knowledge in that wikipedia article (though it helps). You should note, though, that the wikipedia article you yourself cited, cites Feynman, Penrose, and Sheldon Lee Glashow as making an even stronger argument Jane Q. Public is making -- saying that it simply is a failure as a theory, because it doesn't provide practical novel experimental predictions (in other words, it's not more complete than existing theories).

At its root, I think the problem is the definition of socialism:

Your notion of the government regulating capitalism is socialism. Socialism isn't some anticapitalism that will explode on contact with capitalism, and it's not a form of government, though it does sort of imply a couple things about that government that are not at all at odds with capitalism (but are kind of at odds with universally unregulated capitalism).

The history of three cherry-picked men talking about economics?

Running out of room isn't a good reason to go into space. If Earth's population doesn't stabilize on its own, we will have to send off truly massive numbers of people in very short order -- and we'd end up with the same problem we started with because people will just keep reproducing. Consider http://www.open.edu/openlearn/....

If Earth isn't enough, but humanity has enough space, it'll be because we went to space first and then found we had plenty of space to increase our population. Not because our population was so great that we had to escape from Earth. In other words, cause and effect are backwards here. Earth will be enough until we go elsewhere, and even after it'll have to do for most Earthlings. Abandoning Earth en masse is likely to ruin Earth (https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/)

There are other possible motivations. If humanity could set up some system of interstellar trade (unlikely though that may be), that could be a motivation for wanting a larger population than Earth can sustain, in a location distant from Earth. I've also heard the "not all eggs in one basket" motivation for the survival of the human species, which I'm less fond of (why would you want to hedge your bets on that one?). Etc.

The reason they'd want to give up that edge is that right now, they're losing money on that edge.

I'm not advocating any particular solution, but collecting licensing fees rather than paying them isn't a certain profit.

The only argument I see contradicting that is the licensing fee edge, and lots of companies make money despite a licensing fee while Nintendo is losing money even with licensing revenue. Clearly the licensing fee cannot be the single issue blocking such a transition.

I actually like the Wii U (didn't own a Wii, picked it up because it had back-compat and the possibility of its own good exclusives with an actual standard controller), but I kind of anticipated its flopping.

It is absolutely possible to notice a pattern of genre preferences. I have a hard time believing that you are truly, utterly agnostic to all data points and extrapolations.

I like the Avengers. But it doesn't shock me when somebody just isn't a fan of the superhero movie genre. I don't like sports movies. I suppose it's hypothetically possible that a really great one could come out, but I'd bet against it.

(I'm a bit skeptical of calling Firefly a Western, even if the producers called it that -- but then, I don't know that I really have a good handle on what a Western actually is).

Would you be okay with a hypothetical country that allows ALL their citizens the exact same right: one vote per penis?