Which is where they go off the rails because there is no such thing as "the correct amount of regulation". There is a range of regulations that work and beyond it they don't work. There is no one right answer. You can have a more socialist country or a more capitalist one and both can work just fine. This isn't supposition on my part - there are plenty of real world examples of both. There is a range of what works. Some amount of regulation is absolutely required for a society to function. Beyond that there is a range of quantity of regulation that works. Further on you can over-regulate things to death.

The problem libertarians frequently have is they tend to confuse less regulation with being better. Sometimes that's true but frequently it isn't. It's the same mistake a lot of conservatives make regarding taxes - thinking less always equals better when that is demonstrably not true. Sometimes the regulations we have exist for very good reasons but some let ideology get in front of what actually works. You might prefer less regulation to more and that's a fine viewpoint to have but when one gets to the point where you are screeching that all regulations are bad then you no longer are arguing the facts.

Exactly. And thinking all regulation is good is just as stupid.

I don't really care what he wrote. He remained a slave owner which says everything that needs to be said about his opinions on the matter. Jefferson was a remarkable man but also a very flawed one.

Inherited so enthusiastically that 100 years later we had a civil war over it and didn't get anything even remotely resembling real equality until almost 200 years later though many would argue we still aren't quite there. And we're still dealing with the effects.

And yet Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died so clearly they didn't really believe that even if they said so. Actions speak much louder than words. Yes I'm viewing it with modern day viewpoints but the fact remains that they had the choice to free their slaves and I'm quite sure they were aware of that at the time and chose against it.

I have read up on it and I very much disagree. Ironic, hypocritical, self serving... take your pick of description - they all fit. Yes it was a political compromise but there was nothing forcing Washington and Jefferson to continue to own slaves if they really believed it was a repugnant practice. Maybe they disliked the practice but clearly not enough to stop doing it.

Which is rich considering that many of the guys who were behind the writing of that document were slave owners. You're quite correct of course but the irony is rather thick.

That's because many college engineering professors have absolutely no idea what engineering is like in the real world. Some have worked as actual engineers but most of them in my experience went straight into academia with its toy problems and research focus that has little to do with real world engineering. They gloss over stuff that you'll spend a lot of time doing in the real world.

Things they don't teach you in engineering school
* They don't teach nearly enough CAD which is a huge part of doing actual engineering for many engineering disciplines
* They don't teach you how to write good engineering documents and work instructions (most engineers are quite bad at this)
* They don't teach you about process improvement methods (Six Sigma, Kaizen, etc) used in the real world
* They don't teach you about budgets, accounting, cost justifications, or financing (they're REALLY bad about this one)

I could go on an on. You'll learn a lot in an engineering college curriculum but relatively little of it will be directly useful in real world engineering.

What truly is more "societally meaningful" than engineering? Engineers design almost literally every piece of technology used by human kind and we pretty much define ourselves by our ability to build tools. It doesn't get more societally meaningful than that.

A standard McDonalds hamburger does not come with lettuce and tomato. Catsup, mustard, pickle, minced onions. Has 240 calories.

A Big Mac has 530 calories. Not sure what a double Big Mac is since it isn't a standard part of McDonald's menu. By itself a Big Mac is fine now and then but people rarely eat just a Big Mac. Usually they have some fries and a sugar loaded soft drink too. This easily can get the meal over 1000 calories as you mention which is about half the daily caloric intake for an adult male.

No burger sold by McDonalds has "a lot of lettuce". It has at most a small piece (possibly shredded) the size of the bun. That is not a lot of lettuce using any reasonable definition of the word "lot". Furthermore to get enough fiber to actually affect blood sugar levels you would have to eat several cups of the stuff, far more than is in any McDonalds burger.

Depends on your taste buds. Once you drink diet for a while the regular stuff tastes a bit weird. I have trouble finishing a regular can of coke.

Plus the amount of sugar in the normal stuff is ridiculous. I think they should start selling a free insulin shot with every case. Basically you are literally picking your poison.

That's a bit of a stretch even for Google. I'm not saying you are wrong but it doesn't really explain their investment in the technology. That's just too far off to make a connection to a revenue stream at this time.

Honestly the real revenue stream for that sort of technology will probably be in licensing. Making what amounts to a navigation system for a car could be a very real standalone business if they get far enough ahead of the curve. I could see Google spinning it off or licensing the technology somewhere down the road. Google gets the opportunity to direct the technology in ways beneficial to them (maybe) but they aren't the only ones working on this so any ties to their current business model are hugely premature given that not a single vehicle sold has any of this technology embedded in it yet.

Disagree. The ideal team structure for a situation can vary greatly depending on the task at hand and the personalities involved. I make no judgement about what is ideal for a given situation and I've seen a wide variety of team structures work effectively. But what is VERY clear is that having a single individual, no matter how talented, doing something wildly different than the rest of the organization is almost always a recipe for failure. There are exceptions that prove the rule but they are rather rare.

Thanks to the internet it is easier today to have teams time and location shifted particularly if the task is something like software that can be readily broken up in to manageable pieces. But that is relatively rare. My company is a manufacturer and it would be nearly impossible for us to work effectively at different times of day and in different locations.

That grossly oversimplifies the reality of the situation. Things involving real people rarely fall neatly into one of two buckets no matter how much you might wish it were so.

It's not a matter of not being willing to pay higher wages. The economics of the industry are such that it is impossible to pay substantially higher wages. Profit margins in farming are low in the best of times and labor cost is a very substantial percent of the cost of most agriculture products. Higher wages in crop picking does not result in meaningfully higher productivity. A person has a physical limit on how much work they can accomplish in a given amount of time. Higher wages will not result in better productivity beyond a certain point. There also is no way for a single farm (even large agribusinesses) to set prices high enough to offset paying higher wages. We as consumers demand that food prices be kept low and unless you can remove the labor component from the price equation the only way to keep prices low is to pay low wages.

I would love to pay farm workers better wages for picking crops but I really do not see a way to make it a reality. Has nothing to do with a willingness or not to pay living wages.

No it does not. In fact most established companies are demonstrably NOT usually unseated by technology that is much better than the status quo at the time they get unseated. Often the technology is actually worse at least at first. This is the core idea behind disruptive innovations. A better mousetrap is helpful but most of the time it isn't what actually unseats a market leader. What does is technology that changes the market itself rather than being a better version of what already exists.

What has to happen is that the new product or service has to provide a new value proposition that that the market leader cannot match until it is too late. Usually they cannot match it because initially the financial value of the new technology isn't enough to be worth the time for the market leader to develop. Often they fight it because it might cannibalize their existing revenue streams.

Fighting a market leader head on almost always results in the market leader winning. Instead they get unseated by technology that changes the game. There are lots of examples. Linux still hasn't made a dent in the desktop operating system market but it dominates mobile. It changed the game and mobile arguably is where all the growth is. Cell phone cameras still aren't better cameras than standalone point and shoots but they were good enough and are integrated with a networked device everyone already carries. Kodak couldn't be bothered to develop a digital camera business even though they pioneered the technology because they were at their core a chemicals company and couldn't make the shift.

The benefits of having everyone in the office at the same time is that you can be a more effective team. Engineering is (mostly) a team sport. You have to structure the work environment right so distractions and pointless meetings are minimized otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure. But most important is that you need an environment where the team can work effectively together. For most tasks this requires a non-trivial amount of direct interaction with coworkers. While time shifted teams can work in some cases these are rare and remember that we are talking about a time LONG before the internet was a thing so working separately was far more difficult than it is today. If someone doesn't want to work on an engineering team then either they need to be in a (rare) job where that doesn't matter or they simply aren't going to work out.

That's only helpful if you can do your work without involving anyone else which is extremely unusual. Engineering in most cases is a team activity and it's pretty hard to be an effective team if you have one person (even an extremely talented one) who is never present. In the early days of microprocessor development maybe one guy could do the critical work by himself but that doesn't really work as things get more complex. The long run downside of accommodating prima-donna engineers almost always outweighs the upside of their potential contributions.

My guess is that this guy wouldn't have been able to perform given the team requirements. I don't really care how talented he was, eventually the volume of work will overwhelm even the most talented engineer as the business grows and then he had damn well better be able to play nice with others. Sounds like this guy couldn't.

You are quite wrong if you think a lot of the things Google is doing are "afterthoughts". They aren't. You just have to look at them from Google's perspective. Youtube isn't an afterthought, it fits very nicely in with their core advertising business - eyeballs on video has a long tradition. Google+? Integrates business lines for better advertising. Maps? Local search and advertising. Gmail? Advertising based on personal communications. Android? Defensive play to keep Apple and Microsoft from shutting them out of the mobile ad market. Almost everything Google does supports their core advertising business either by extending it or protecting it. 95% of their revenue comes from ads (look it up - it's in their financial statements) and that number hasn't budged.

Google seems to live by the "fail fast" mantra. If they don't think something is going to be a home run they close it down fairly quickly. I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes but at least I can wrap my head around what they are doing. Otherwise they would eventually end up with a bunch of small products used by a tiny group of people that cost them far more to maintain than they will ever generate in revenue. I understand the frustration with never being sure if they'll keep a product around but it's not hard to understand why they are doing it.

The driverless car thing is flashy and cool but it gets WAY more press than is justified by the amount of money and effort Google is actually pouring into it. It's genuinely not that big a deal for Google and isn't likely to move the needle on their revenue or costs for many years if ever. Driverless cars is a research project by the closest thing Google has to a basic science research group. Any benefits from it will likely take decades to fully realize.

Google is certainly being more sane than Facebook. $2 billion for Occulus? Explain to me how that will ever tie into Facebook's business model or how that price is remotely justifiable given the likely ROI. However I don't see Facebook going away any time soon unless they do something truly moronic. Never underestimate the power of network effects in keeping a user base around. See eBay if you need a good example. Terrible to do business with but everyone goes there because that's where everyone else is.

Do you think anyone really cares if you've never bought anything from an online music store? Do you think that makes you superior in some way? The term hipster is stupid and usually used poorly but I think it might apply here.

Those of us with actual jobs and real life obligations have better things to do than track down random artists in person so we can throw an extra $5 at them in person.

And my hipster theory is confirmed. Do you have a point to make or are you just trying to be smug?