Obviously not the only influence, but this quote from David Brooks sums up an interesting, less discussed aspect of why we work more / the same:

"As in so many spheres of Bobo life, all that was profane has been made holy. Businesspeople talk like artists. Corporations enthuse about their social missions. Managers emphasize creativity and liberation. .... And the weird thing is that when employees start thinking like artists, they actually work harder for the company. In the 1960s most social theorists assumed that as we got richer, we would work less. But if work is a form of self-expression or a social mission, then you never want to stop. You are driven by the relentless urge to grow, to learn, to feel more alive. Executives who dreamed of turning themselves into refined gentlemen may have valued leisure, but executives who aspire to be artists value work." -- David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

There is a megawatt ecat in North Carolina, and it is happily operating day after day, making you look sillier and sillier.

I doubt that. But I am certain that you are a slanderer.

> cold fusion - it worked like claimed, would be damn easy to verify to actually happen.

Firstly, it is increasingly easy to verify low-energy nuclear reactions, as the exponentially expanding body of verifications attests.

Secondly, observations of low-energy nuclear reactions are not dependent upon theoretical explanations.

Thirdly, there are a wide variety of hypothesized mechanisms whereby nucleon-nucleus interactions may occur at low energies. Your comment was quite vague, and its coherence depends upon the structure of a particular hypothesis, which one is left unspecified. This makes the premise irrefutable, and hence meaningless, and therefore the inference is meaningless.

Fourthly, peer review and traditional scientific process is not skipped by all researchers in the field. Yes, there are a number of notable amateur or commercial researchers who are not particularly interested in playing the game we call science. Their success or failure will be measured in practical devices being applied in industry or infrastructure. not by the progress of mainstream science. That's perfectly alright. Science will catch up, if they manage to leap ahead.

Fifthly, there is nothing pseudo-scientific about observing phenomena with careful instrumentation, submitting processes to peer review, hypothesizing physical mechanisms which may underlie the observed phenomena, and formulating experimental procedures to test those hypotheses. This is occuring in LENR, but for the most part it is occurring in minor journals and specialist conferences, whereas in the absence of an irrational aversion to the topic, it would benefit from wider scrutiny and the attention of a larger proportion of the professional scientific community. Given the quality and level of the results observed to date, this would be much to the benefit of society at large, as it can be foreseeably expected to result in technological advance and diffusion at a higher rate than observed so far.

It must be comforting to live in such a simple world, but I suspect you will do a lot of damage before the model discrepancies force an update.

No one sane would consider me conservative, in any regard. I consider AGW a very poor explanation for the established facts (which include dramatic ongoing climate change).

I consider low-energy nuclear reactions to be extremely well-established, and doubt that the physics community will persist in resisting the tide of evidence, now that Robert Park is well-dead and buried.

Other planets are heating as well, indicating a non-anthropic cause.

The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor. In comparison, everything else is a rounding error.

It doesn't matter though, we will get draconian regulation of fossil fuels. That horse has left the barn. Time to invest in renewables and, yes, low-energy nuclear.

Agreed, Bitcoin's transparent blockchain means all of your activities are published to the world, and tracked actively by dozens of corps and goverment TLAs.

For that reason, I prefer to transact using XMR, which offers cryptographic guarantees of privacy, using an opaque blockchain protected by iterated ring signatures. I can still send BTC to bitcoin wallets by using xmr.to or shapeshift.io, making it no less liquid and usable than bitcoin, and I know that none of my activities can be traced back to me unless I intentionally publish an audit key.

If you transact on the bitcoin blockchain, you are giving up all hope of effective privacy. This IRS guy started out by picking off SilkRoad users by tracing blockchain transactions. Ulbricht was a lucky strike, due to Ross's opsec failures, and did not depend on transaction history, but the little fish he picked off were all victims of the public transparent blockchain.

That's why I think the future of free enterprise lies in opaque blockchains with cryptographic privacy guarantees built-in by default. Anything else leaves you open to blackmail, extortion, or, at the optimistic best, tracking in the manner of facebook/google/et-filia.

I transact in Monero whenever possible for this reason. Particularly if the value of my XMR holdings were to rise dramatically, I would not want my identity tracable through linking to exchange transactions. Whenever I want to spend bitcoin, I do so through xmr.to or shapeshift.io, spending XMR at market XMR/BTC exchange rates.

As soon as most inspections went to a computer hookup instead of an actual "sniffer" in the tailpipe it was bound to happen. Any code can be cracked and a work around found. If someone can write the program someone else can find a way to screw it up.

Or just install Tinfoil for Facebook which is just a wrapper on the mobile site and fairly limited in terms of the permissions needed.

What do you expect from a country run by Tata consultants?

Since they have a virtual Quarterback, it makes sense. If they had a real one...

In the 90's you couldn't even get a student loan for any degree level in Philosophy. Why? The only jobs are for those with a PHD teaching Philosophy at the University level. I learned this when I went back for a business degree. Yet in the idiotic push for the ridiculous "well rounded" education, students are forced to take useless classes like this. Subsidizing classes with no real value in the job market.

that would explain why you came so close yet utterly failed to detect the effect, thereby losing your nobel

You are assuming that we don't want the crew dead.