I never gave my opinion on the matter. Your ignorant political stereotypes led you to make assumptions about what things I never even commented on. This is common amongst political ideologues and other loudmouths and pundits.

If it were mindless tripe you'd swallow it without a second thought. The fact is you've completely failed to grasp the points which were being made. Calling it "mindless tripe" because you don't understand it is ... pretty childish. Reminds of the hick I met down in the bible belt who called evolution "mindless tripe". You two would get along great.

I don't think you know what that fallacy actually means. Nothing I wrote is even close to an excluded middle fallacy. The particular bit you quoted might be considered a sweeping generalization, if it weren't so blatantly evident that I was mocking your kindergarten-level understanding of economics.

Hurr, durr, ad-hominem fallacy!

I think VW might contract the actual manufacturing to Chrysler.

Indeed. The VW Routan was a Chrysler Town and Country with some different skins on the inside and out. It was so much not a VW product that the VCDS system (the thing you can use to do vehicle diagnostics on any VW, Audi, Seat, or Skoda product since the early 90s) doesn't even talk to it.

In the German market, VW sells Vans of all different sizes. None of them are currently imported to the US; the Eurovan was the last rest-of-world van that was available in North America.

We have 3 kids in car seats, and an Odyssey.

When we lived in town, it was great. Back then, my only serious gripe with the Odyssey is that if you are running a second set of wheels (e.g. for permanently mounted snow tires), and don't fit a 2nd set of expensive TPMS sensors to those wheels, the VSA (stability control) cannot be defeated via the console switch.

This is a problem because the VSA implementation sucks and is frankly unsafe when accelerating on surface transitions - for instance, when you are waiting on a gravel road and are about to pull onto a paved highway, the VSA system senses differing levels of wheel grip between the wheel on pavement and the wheel still on gravel, and cuts power, precisely when you need maximum power to quickly get to highway speed.

Last fall we moved to a rural area, and now poorly maintained roads (deep snow in the winters until I clear it, deep ruts whenever there are rains) has really shown me the shortcomings of the vehicle. My wife has gotten it stuck 4 times in our first winter.

The Odyssey needs 2 things to be superlative. Air suspension with adjustable ride height (it is a very low vehicle, for ease of entry/exit for small kids), and a proper AWD system.

My wife is now desperately wanting an AWD vehicle. But to get a proper AWD system (e.g. locking transfer case or at least a torsen differential), and the useful seating capacity of a minivan, you need to be looking at full-size truck based SUVs, like the Excursion or Sequoia.

I'm aware that the Sienna comes in an AWD version, but its particular AWD system and ride height doesn't inspire me that they will be foolproof enough to want to make the switch.

Sadly, my wife also refuses to drive a Mercedes G-wagen :)

As an aside, the Odyssey towing capacity isn't really sufficient. It's 3500lbs, and it requires upfitting the vehicle considerably with things that don't come factory - PS cooler, ATF cooler, hitch wiring, etc. (In addition to the actual hitch receiver).

When we were considering camping options, essentially nothing that had enough floor space for a family of 5 could be towed behind an Odyssey.

Not always, but you know how it is with bureaucracies ... nothing gets them motivated quite as well as a good disaster.

Naw, man. I mean, sure, there are some superficial similarities, but the things which actually caused the incidents are COMPLETELY different.

The Soviet shootdown is a simple case of browbeaten lackeys under a tyrannical regime making what they figured was the best choice to cover their asses. There was no threat to them. The aircraft was nowhere near the people who made the call, and was on it's way out of Soviet airspace. The pilot involved even told them he believed it was a civilian airliner. Yet they decided to shoot it down anyway.

The Vincennes incident was the exact opposite. It involved personnel under serious threat from Iranian forces, in hostile territory, faced with an aircraft they couldn't identify which seemed to be on an attack vector. They were scared for their lives, and under an immense amount of stress. I'm not sure how to explain that to someone who works a 9-5 job in an office. Lots of people talk about "stress" in their day-to-day jobs, and I'm sure there's some truth to their complaints, but unless you're a first responder, an air traffic controller, or a soldier in a combat zone, you really don't know what stress is, or how badly it can skew your normal behaviour. We train our people to recognize it, avoid it, or deal with it ... and we put measures in place to try and minimize it ... but when you're engaged in combat and feel that your life is on the line, even the best preparations can only do so much. It only gets worse when you're the one responsible for a multi-million dollar vessel, and several hundred lives on board it.

The difference may be easier to visualize if you relate it to something you're more familiar with. The Soviet shootdown of 007 was the equivalent of a couple police supervisors sitting at headquarters, ordering a patrolman to shoot an unarmed man running away from a property he trespassed on. The American shootdown of the Iranian flight was the equivalent of a couple SWAT guys under heavy fire panicking and shooting a civilian who was running towards them. Both are horrible incidents which should never have happened. But other than that, they have absolutely nothing in common.

Sure. So lets pass a law that says every person should be paid $50,000 per hour. Economic activity ought to be AMAZING then!

Very true. If you meet the minimum skill required for the minimum-wage job, you get a crappy job that pays your basic expenses, but won't pay off that credit card you keep racking up because now you can afford more useless crap. If you don't meet the minimum skill requirements, then fuck you - you're stuck on the government dole because we won't let you sell your services for less. Our minimum living standard says you have to be a parasite rather than contributing to society.

Totally right. Especially when we implement our $50,000 minimum wage idea. If those fatcat small business guys can't afford it, fuck 'em; someone else will come along to start a business once the economy settles down.

Totally. Just like mass-surveys become more and more useless the more people you add to them. And scientific research becomes more and more useless the more data points you gather.

The funny thing is, fulfilling his FOIA request is probably the first time anyone in government actually looked at his data.

And these days they do. It's one of those "lessons learned" things.

I, along with a bunch of other guys, once got sucked into lighting up an entire household of civilians in training. It really, really sucked. But the reason those scenarios existed is because some poor bastards lit up civilian households for real, and we got to learn from their mistakes.

I feel your pain, bro. Comments that criticize the US government and offer justifications for terrorist attacks always get SO badly down-voted.

Very true. rt.com is the propaganda outlet of choice these days, as far as external puppets are concerned. Internally ... well, all of them publish whatever they think Putin wants them to publish.

You complain about strawmen, then string together a strawman of your own. Nobody is suggesting that humans need to travel to Titan.

"mark-t" was absolutely right. Your statement was absurd, and my parody illustrated it's absurdity. Our unsuitability to space is entirely irrelevant. You're right in pointing out that there are many aspects of space exploration which are best done by machines; you're completely wrong when you take that idea and present it as an absolute for why no human should ever go into space.

The fact that mark had to explain my comment to you is ... rather embarrassing, but not unexpected.

To suggest that we, ill adapted to flight as we are, ought to go physically into the sky instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.

Hi there. Been an engineer at Microsoft since 2000. Have interviewed hundreds of people at all skill levels.

Why do you assume that wages at Microsoft aren't increasing?

I understand the compensation model, and how it has changed in my 14 years. The comp packages we are offering to college grads these days are astoundingly lucrative. Every few years in my career, there has been a big compensation realignment based on market realities. Everytime something at work upsets me enough that I start talking to other companies, their comp packages (especially with cost of living factored in) aren't able to match what I'm getting now from Microsoft.

Lately, high comp packages are required to compete with Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, who all have plenty of money, and, for younger developers, are often seen as cooler places to work than old stodgy Microsoft.

I just see no evidence that H1-Bs are a mechanism for the company to save money. Dealing with HB-1 hassles involves a lot of overhead and expense that are not applicable to domestic employees.

As I said earlier, I have interviewed many, many folks, for many positions. The hire rate is not as high as we would like it to be. It never feels good to have to turn someone down, and it is a waste of time for everyone when an interview doesn't go well. But the bottom line is, we talk to many more people than we can feel confident about making an offer to. There are lots of STEM graduates, foreign and domestic. But not all of them are someone we could feel comfortable hiring. I'm sure you've known people in your CS class who could get good grades but who couldn't code... those people count as "qualified STEM applicants" to people that are pushing the "H1B is evil" rhetoric, but we all know that just because someone has a degree doesn't mean they are employable in that field... and certainly not by the top organizations in that field.

I've also seen no evidence that Microsoft has a preference for hiring H1-Bs, or that there is any compensation disparity for H1-Bs. I have seen evidence that H1-Bs cost the company money that domestic employees do not. For example, the company has special lawyers and paperwork people that deal with H1-B and other immigrant-labor related problems. That's a cost. When H1-B engineers are dealing with this stuff (which is frustratingly often), they aren't writing code or analyzing tests. That's a hit to their productivity, which ultimately, is another cost.

Uh, but how do you tell when you succeed? Are we even close to discovering what consciousness is?

Isn't it possible to build a computer that behaves as if it is conscious but isn't? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This is one of the big mysteries of the universe. There's no need for us to be conscious but we are. Or at least I am, I can't really be 100% sure about the rest of you... ;)

It's kind of funny that scientists have difficulty explaining one of the very first observations they make.