Take your paycheck, go home safely, and do not infringe upon civil liberties.

It's not getting laid by all the hot babes on mine Facebook that stresses me out, you insensitive clod!

While I misspoke about kickbacks, here's an example of what I was referring to, which is Amazon attempting to get out of paying taxes (in this case it should arguably be exempt from retroactively paying them) by creating jobs in the state and investing capital. Again, arguably a fair trade for the state, but this sucks if Amazon is your competition, because it doesn't undo the damage of Amazon cutting into your sales:

"The settlement resolves the online retailer's ongoing dispute with [Texas], which claimed that Amazon owed $269 million in back taxes. In addition to taking up collection, Amazon has agreed to create at least 2,500 jobs and invest a minimum of $200 million in capital investments, though it admits no fault, ..."

To their folly, hitherto many states have let Amazon and other online sites sell things tax free. While making a consumer's dollar go farther, it sucked tax money away from said states (although perhaps those states got kick-backs from Amazon) and cannibalized competing local businesses. (Granted, local business might include not-locally-based chains or franchises like Best Buy, but that's its own problem. Regardless, local business = local jobs.) Then you've got the issue of strip-mall USA where a person has to use a couple of gallons worth of gas to get to a store in the first place, which is another thing in Amazon's favor. All that said, I live in Seattle (Amazon's home), in the areas where you can walk everywhere and don't need a car. Things are dense, and there are lots of cool local stores, including a book store I like (Elliott Bay Books, which conveniently sells Google Play Books online and also has its own, independent cafe) and a couple of record stores. I would rather pay more for goods from these stores because they give Seattle the feel of a neighborhood (or a collection of neighborhoods, as it were). I can accept that bookstores and record stores are on their way out (as are the physical mediums of books and CDs), but I'm uncomfortable with the concentrating of SOOOOOOO much business through one supplier's gateway. Thus, it's always a bit weird to hear of people BUYING BUYING BUYING. Chill out, consume less, and think about where your dollar is going, rather than just trying to amass shit for you and yours. At least this is the mantra I tell myself.

Why is a vaccine useful to (and being tested on) someone already infected?

Let's assume you can teach yourself anything they can teach you in a non-PhD Master's program.

Negatives:
(a) money, unless you get them to pay for it.
(b) time
(c) academia: bureaucracy, and that horrible anti-l337speak research papers are written in

Positives:
(a) practical if you're jumping fields into an entirely different career path, or if your career is kinda in a slump and you need to inject a bit of juice back into it. (Like say you just took two years off to travel the world.)
(b) extrinsic motivation, in the form of a curriculum and schedule of things to learn and do
(c) good place to meet a collected-or-similarly-unhinged significant other


In your case, it sounds like you don't need a career boost or anything, so how about just cooking up some cool shit at home, unless you want to meet some C.S. babes?

Ah, I'm a white American, but also fluent in Japanese, and I love Japan (though I live in the U.S. now).

While we're presumably mostly familiar with American problems, here are some I find with Japan:
- inability to question authority (found in Korea, too, I'm told)
- misogyny. Not explicit, but more implicit, just in that women get stuck with shit jobs and get sexualized in all sorts of bizarre ways. (I *hate* snack bars and hostess clubs, not to mention massage parlors.(
- lack of creative thinking. If it's not by the literal book, it can't be done. Countless examples exist. (There's a good one in "Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs," a book you can hate, but which has a great example of this involving ordering milk at Mr. Doughnuts.)
- concrete EVERYWHERE. Where is the fucking grass?
- absolutely no rights as a non-citizen, which is compounded by:
- racial profiling. Yes, even us white males.
- cigarette smoking EVERYWHERE. (Though last I saw Shibuya had prohibited it -- - in its main thoroughfares.)
- service fees for "nothing" abound at restaurants and izakayas and bars, and key money for apartments.
- etc.


BUT, Japan is super clean, I think the Japanese are by-and-large good folk (as are people everywhere, duh), and it is a BEAUTIFUL country when you aren't looking at concrete.

Also, to the original poster, if you think the U.S. sucks, well, I mean, really dude? Read some economics books, a lot of the huge political issues for the U.S. aren't really world-ending and terrible (e.g. debt... we do have to pay it down, and it will be paid down at some point, hopefully sooner than later, but it's not going to destroy the U.S. or anything). Also, I think the driving culture of the U.S. is unfortunate, BUT it is its own means of freedom of a sort. Anyways, it's a place, it's not so bad, be grateful that you can be here for now.

"Every U.S. state except Washington experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, NOAA reported." Run, children, run from the Pacific NorthWest. Do not come here, the sun does not shine.

The iPatch!

Cell phones use non-ionizing radiation. I'm all for some studies to double-check our assumptions, but hypothetically isn't that the end of the story?

Dig it.

The problem with alternative car fuels is that they're a solution to the wrong problem: the real issue is that it's not sustainable for every person on the planet to transport himself and two tons of metal an average distance of sixteen miles one-way as part of a daily commute.

So, if Schmidt works for the federal government as a technical advisor and retains his Google stock, that's a conflict of interest, right? (I don't know whether he'll be allowed to retain his Google stock, but I haven't read anything to the contrary yet.) I mean, I'm all for trusting someone, but clearly that's led us into disaster as regarding the financial industries.

From what I understand, the patients were merely given pills labeled 'placebo'. Do we know that all patients could read and knew what 'placebo' meant?

Question: in general, is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorize a new latin root? (Assuming that you can't derive the meaning from radicals / sub-ideograms within the ideograms or similar words.) The only serious problem I see in using technological interfaces and consequently forgetting how to write characters is when people have to take a test (be it college entrance examinations or job tests, etc.) and are forced to complete a writing section by hand. A big problem I see in suggesting that the Chinese and Japanese romanize or hangul-ize their alphabets is what other people have suggested: there's a shitton of human culture and history that will be lost. It would be awful. Also, as others have pointed out, once you're fluent in Japanese or Chinese, it's possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms. Some linguist or psychologist should do some tests to verify or test that hypothesis.