How many people were saying the same thing about the Japanese economy in the late 80s? Answer, almost all of them. Do a google search for China and debt and you will see what I mean. They are also not the "sole manufacturing center for most of the west". Very little value is added in China, and it's manufacturing that can be done elsewhere, and is increasing done elsewhere as China gets more and more expensive, both economically and politically. Crappy hardware trade shows do not an economy make.

It's only going to get worse as the chinese economy stagnates. I've been saying this for years, but people are finally starting to realize that China copied the post-war Japanese model right down to the bad loans, today's China is pretty much where Japan was in 1988, barreling towards the cliff. The difference between the 2 countries is the government though. Outside of the economy the CCP has been deeply unpopular for years. However there was little unrest since the economy was booming. However what will happen when growth slows is much more unclear. Hong Kong like protests against the government would probably be the best case. More likely is large scale riots as unemployment coupled with a large # of men being unable to find a wife is a recipe for disaster. The CCP knows they are living on borrowed time and are going to do everything in their power, including perhaps returning to the days of the cultural revolution if it finds it necessary. In the short term expect spying incidents like this to become the norm.

So you'd have to somehow engineer a way to walk around in public bleeding, puking, ejaculating, and defecating on people around you - all without it being obvious that you were very unhealthy.

So.....basically you should attend burning man?

And Obama and the Democrats made it worse with this FACTA bullshit. Basically as a US citizen abroad, both me and my family have to report stuff to the IRS(bank accounts, investment accounts etc) that I wouldn't have to report to the IRS if I were in the United States. And if you fail to report they will help themselves to your bank account, even if you didn't actually do anything other than forget to file. And it doesn't apply to just individuals, any American with signature authority on a foreign account, be it business or personal, has to report the details of that bank account to the IRS.

And here is the kicker, the whole thing is actually predicted, even by the supporters of the bill, to be revenue negative. Meaning they are SPENDING TAXPAYER MONEY to fuck over Americans living abroad. The sheer stupidity of this bill is staggering. I had up to that point always been a democrat and a supporter of Obama, but this just drove me away from both. I even donated some money to a Republican-led campaign to challenge this incredibly unconstitutional bill in the supreme court. This bill is responsible for an almost exponential increase in the # of Americans getting rid of their citizenship, perhaps most famous among them Tina Turner, who is now a Swiss citizen.

(Un)fortunately, I live in a country that is basically beholden to the US and as a coder I don't expect to be in charge of corporate bank accounts , so it's not a huge deal, but it's just the principal of the thing. More here

They aren't targeting consumers, they are targeting myopic, greedy executives who want to do something really simple and claim themselves to be geniuses who deserve gigantic paychecks.

How much of a vested interest does Gartner have in this technology? My guess is a lot, it's 2003 all over again. In 2003 Gartner predicted that within the next 10 years over 50% of IT jobs would be sent overseas, and by the way we also happen to have an offshore IT consulting service, what a coincidence, totally unrelated to our over exaggerated findings, really!

Did they try to find men who left the field as a control group? The reasons cited in TFA also applies to a lot of men I know that have left the industry. I would like to know if it really affects women, also whether or not a higher % of women leave the tech industry vs men, esp. if you control for being a parent.

I always just assumed they were inspired by Leisure Suit Larry versioning system.

We were taught that in high school physics where I grew up too(the US, though admittedly a richer part of the US). The weaker gravity is the reason space missions are launched from places that are close to the equator, Florida in the US and French Guiana for the ESA. Though granted the reason for this discrepancy(distance to the center of the earth is greater near the equator due to the earth not being a perfect sphere) is different than the reasons for this most recent change

It's planetary herpes

My advice is not to tongue kiss people who just got off the plane from west African countries and you should be fine.

The terrorists have already won.

So you mean I can continue to make sweet, sweet love to rats without worrying about whether or not doing so will cause the apocalypse?

Well, speaking from experience in the Japan 2011 earthquake, you are kind of on the mark kind of not.

b) it won't really work in major natural disasters, because, well in order to maintain the density of devices, a large number of people need to have continuous access to power, which is unlikely if a disaster is so severe that communication infrastructure is offline (I imagine celltowers are less fragile than power lines).

After power was turned back on, I, and a lot of other people, went out and bought a hand-cranked USB charger(also doubles as a flashlight and radio, a handy device to be sure). It doesn't take that much energy to power a cell phone.
As for the tower issue, the towers where I was at(Tsukuba, which is about halfway between Tokyo and Fukushima) all kept power even after the quake but since so many people were using their phones to either call people or check the news it was almost impossible to get through(the bandwidth of the tower may have very well been degraded as well). A mesh network *might* have been useful there, but it would have had to have enough density to work. Really the biggest problem with using a mesh network for disaster is that anywhere you have enough people to support a mesh network, you could probably just as easily use a bullhorn to communicate.

" A lot of people think if you get struck by lightning you will get magic powers. Like the ability to read minds or shoot lightning from your hands. Not me. I got the ability to shake on the ground and shit my pants. Will I use these powers for good or for evil?"

Kurt Vonnegut had a chillingly accurate prediction of the economy of the future in "Player Piano". While of course it contains the standard 1950s era scifi references to huge computers filled with vaccum tubes and it doesn't accurately predict what will happen with sending work abroad but his point about what we do with the now "useless" people is spot on.

In the book you are either one of the lucky few who have the skills and opportunity to become an engineer or else you have meaningless work found for you, either in the army or one of a large number of mostly pointless public works projects. This is eerily similar to the economies of a lot of the rich world, especially the U.S. while the rabid flag waivers don't want to admit it, most soldiers in the U.S. army today are only there because becoming a soldier was their only real chance to live something resembling a middle class lifestyle. We also have huge numbers of menial jobs whose only real purpose is to create busy work selling chinese made goods to each other. I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to see the downside of the "maker economy"