Nato seems to believe there are at least a thousand Russian troops in Ukraine. Ukraine says it is more like 1,600. Either way, Putin says 1,000 troops is irrelevant because he can take Ukraine within 2 weeks if he so orders.

So, not really just rumors.

If you want expert analysis of the Russian government, what better source is there? It is an independent Finnish-owned english language paper specializing in the news of Russia.

Would you go to Izvestia or Pravda instead? Gazeta? Moscow Times might lean against the current government in Russia, but at least they are independent and able to publish critical commentary. You can't really expect the Times of London or the New York Times to have the same level of expertise in Russian politics as the Moscow Times either.

There is no doubt that she has the chops and anyone would be lucky to snare an executive with her background and talents. But the article's focus on what degree she has is just silly. The brightest developer I ever knew had a degree in chemistry. The best Director of development I ever hired was an Air Force tech. The best COO I ever worked for was a lawyer / polysci major with no business classes under his belt. The best Director of IT I ever had earned an associates degree and got her A+ certification to get her first job.

Meanwhile, the worst Director of Development I ever had was an MS of CompSci with an MBA. Guy was a tool and an idiot. The worst COO I ever had was an MBA with top grades from a top school. The worst CFO I ever worked with was a chemistry major. OK, that one kinda goes against my point. Forget about him.

  Still, my point stands:

If you are still worrying about your degree 20 years out of college, you haven't done anything.

You gotta love science infotainment.

The discovery was made possible through combining observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

All of those great imaging systems, but we don't get to see any of the images used? Instead we are given an artist's rendition of a galaxy core forming as the lead image. But where's this extreme redshift galaxy?

For those who care to see something real, NASA did include an image of GOODS-N-744 with labels so you could see the fuzzy spot for yourself. I guess you have to wait for the article to be published to see the data from Spitzer and Herschel.

I don't know about that. The Super-Conducting Super Collider was abandoned after sinking a ton of cash. So was the FBI's Virtual Case File project, which sounds like a dead ringer for the Oregon website project.

Or even different skills. Not every great system administrator is a great manager. I gave my best SysAdmin a shot at being the Director of IT infrastructure. He not only failed, he was miserable. So we put him back in his old job and moved up a young lady who had less training and experience, but more ambition. She worked out wonderfully.

Not every great player can be a coach (look at how it worked out for Magic Johnson). And not every great coach was a great player (Dean Smith, Mike Kryzewski)

in the run-up to the new season they ran a show that specifically touted the input from fans, including fan-produced content like episodes and trailers. The new season's opening sequence was created by a fan that they discovered from a demo opening sequence he posted on the internet. Seems they are at least a bit schizophrenic about such things.

Interesting that he chose dentistry. Over at Science Based Medicine I learned about the new Science Based Dentistry group. They are a few years behind the medical field, but this group is trying to push for more scientific rigor in the field of dentistry. In the podcast that introduced me to the Science Based Dentistry folks they actually mentioned the fact that most of the "best practices" of dentistry have not been rigorously studied. They pointed out a recent study that demonstrated that flossing doesn't actually help prevent gum disease and didn't really provide any benefit to dental health. Completely against the "conventional wisdom" - and to be honest pretty much completely against common sense. Apparently this was the largest and most rigorous study on the topic ever performed. Since it isn't my field of interest, I didn't follow up, but I still found it very instructive that something as "scientific" as dentistry is so weak on clinical studies.

Medicine has its own problems in that regard. Most primary care level doctoring seems to be experience based and informed by science, more than purely scientific. Sadly, I ran into the result of this just this week. My pediatrician recommended what she termed an "herbal remedy" that they had samples of in the office. She wasn't sure if it worked, but she offered a free sample. I told her I suspected woo, but took it anyway. Once I got the box in hand I could see that not only was it based on completely made-up herbal history - it was a 5C homeopathic preparation of the herbs in question. Pure, unadulterated snake oil. Really a sad state of affairs.

Or "buggars the question" if it is a politician.

That is all just ballocks. The number people care about when they buy a blanket is "how much money do I hand to the shopkeep." Yes, sales tax are "collected on behalf of the government". This is a distinction without a difference. If I collect 10 bucks for a blanket and send 80 cents to the local government it doesn't matter what you label it. If my cost of goods sold is $8 and 0.80 goes to local taxes that leaves a buck twenty for me. Of which the state and federal government take another bite - 13% for FICA, 8% for medicare, 30% for income tax - call it 0.60 just for the sake of argument. That leaves me with 60 cents in my pocket.

So you can whack it up anyway you like, put any labels on it you like, but the final result is that the government takes away twice as much from that sale as I do.

Most small businesses don't have special set-asides in the tax code that allow them to offset income with special incentives stuck in the code by their favorite congressmen. They don't pay taxes on gross revenue any more than you do. You have a line called "adjusted gross income" on your tax return. You get special interest set-asides for things like owning a home, having kids or being a refugee immigrant farmer who is an elementary school teacher. Big corporations get similar set-asides designed just for them, particularly if they are in insurance, banking, energy, farming or the automotive sector. Exxon pays the full tax rate based on their adjusted income, just like you do. The "unfair" part isn't what the final number is, it is in all of the special tax incentives that are put in place just for Exxon and their cohort.

This is why the wealthiest counties in America are all clustered around Washington DC.

Here's the top of the list:

Falls Church City, Va.
Loudoun County, Va.
Los Alamos County, N.M.
Howard County, Md.
Fairfax County, Va.
Hunterdon County, N.J.
Arlington County, Va.

None of these DC counties were on the list in the 90's when government spending was out of control at nearly a trillion dollars. At 3 trillion, look at where all of the wealth is concentrated.

All of that also assumes that there is no corruption, no good ol' boy's network, no cronyism. The bigger the pile of money there is to redistribute, the greater the incentives to corruption - which of course leads to more inefficient use of resources.

This is why the nutty people on the extreme left (those anti-corporation, anti-corporate-control nutballs) and the crazy extremists on the right (those anti-government, cold-dead-hand-gun-totin' crazies) have common cause in creating the smallest government possible. A government with little power and little wealth to spread around is not attractive to corporate lobbyists.

Of course, without all that lobbyist support they have a snowball's chance in hell of electing any of their candidates.

I don't think libertarian means what you think it means. You seem to have replaced the "neocon" boogeyman word from the 90's with "libertarian". They are not the same thing. In fact, they are in many ways diametrically opposed.

Libertarians are those wackos who are so far to the left that they fall of the map. Or so far to the right. It's hard to tell. They have this nutty notion that if they want to smoke dope in their gay polyamorous collective while shooting guns and drinking unpasturized milk during their worship of the sun-god - well, they should be left alone to their own devices. Kind of a "if you aren't free to make stupid choices, then you have no freedom" sort of ideal.

When I had a small business a while back the numbers were pretty sobering. Between sales tax collected, property taxes, income taxes, FICA, etc. the government took over twice as much away from my business as I received. In a highly competitive, low margin business the government often takes a larger percentage than the principals.

Factor in the accounting and other recordkeeping required for compliance with tax and other regulatory laws taking over a third of my time and it just wasn't worth it. Absent all of the layers of government I had a nice little business. But after a couple of years it became apparent that you have to be above a certain size to make a go of it. Anything less and the resources devoted to compliance and taxes are just too great to make it worth the effort.

So I gave up and joined someone else's startup that had more growth potential. We managed to break through the small business trap and grow to a midsized company. Even so, we were often right at the cusp of going under. Several times we were forced to make bad deals just to get the cash flow to make payroll. And you don't think that an extra few million bucks a year would have made a difference on how many people we could hire?

Any added expense makes it more difficult to hire more people. Very few businesses are flush with cash like Microsoft and Apple.

That was always my opinion. Unless you happen to run a business that has been completely solved in the enterprise software world - something like a mortgage broker or a restaurant - I would rather roll my own. I met a group who started a mortgage company and their entire business plan centered around using things off the shelf as they were intended to be used - designing their business processes around the available tools rather than trying to customize them to an existing business plan. Their IT shop was amazingly cheap - because they didn't customize anything. They even used off-the-shelf reports.

My business was such a niche market that nothing off-the-shelf would work for us without major customization. So we designed our own systems from the ground up around the business processes we needed automating. We ended up building a dozen CRM applications from scratch and definitely saved millions for the company on each one.

The nice thing is that everyone recognized how great it was that we saved them millions each year on software licenses while pumping up productivity across the enterprise. And we were all handsomely rewarded. And we all got rainbow ponies.....