My assumption is that a level 1 employee who excels at their job gets promoted to level 2, repeating that cycle until they get to the level where they no longer excel at their job and receive no more promotions.

I think it's debatable whether an employee at their plateau level of promotion is merely good enough or actually incompetent. It's probably both and circumstantial. Someone promoted to their plateau may be just good enough not to get terminated immediately but not good enough to retain the position long term when faced with a superior replacement.

And its probably this kind of self-aware incompetence which traps managers into hiring underachievers. Their personal success requires their underlings to be good enough but not good enough to challenge them, which I imagine is only magnified down the line.

How is the dollar or any currency used as a peg currency?

I don't see why a country couldn't just say "Our currency, the fubar is pegged at the rate of 10 fubars to the bitcoin." Anyone needing to conduct transactions in fubars would have to then buy 10 fubars for one bitcoin.

The only way this works, though, is for the government to restrict transactions in other currencies and only allow the national bank under their control buy foreign currencies. I think some get even more draconian, forcing travelers to trade all their foreign currency at entry to the local currency at the official exchange rate and then sell you your own currency back at exit.

Of course this doesn't stop black markets for currency, every country with an official exchange rate has them, more so if the official exchange rate is greatly detached from reality. But these can be dangerous and you may find you detached from your freedom.

While I support net neutrality as a concept and as a form of regulation (with a big dash of hope, too), none of this would be an issue if there was any competition for residential high speed internet access.

Caps, quotas, asymmetry, prohibitions on "servers", crippling of web sites like Netflix -- none of this would be happening at all if there was meaningful high speed Internet competition. Providers who did this would be gutted by the market for vendors who didn't do these things. This is all rent-seeking behavior by monopolists, and worse, by monopolists whose business model can see its own funeral on the calendar.

And the lack of viable competition in most markets is why regulation is necessary, otherwise the monopolists would just keep manipulating the market.

That's an interesting idea. Could we have used all the shuttle money to have launched enough stuff to have a huge space station in orbit by now, possibly with a large interplanetary ship we assembled in space?

Or does stuff in space kind of rot away into unusableness and what we'd really have is a huge floating derelict that wouldn't be fixable?

What I mean is, does a public news-ticker kind of short message service fill such an obvious need/value that even if Twitter(tm) didn't exist it would ultimately exist anyway?

What you mean is that releasing the earnings after hours allows all the big guys to dump shares first, minimizing their losses, and everyone else wondering if they should eat the now-massive losses on what they hold or just keep holding and hope it goes up again.

With the rise in satellite television and the appearance of eight zillion satellite dishes, I thought that local regulation of them got slapped down because they fell under the FCC's domain and were exempt from local regulation.

I think the biggest problem with usage billing would be "I fell asleep watching ... and now I have to pay for what I didn't see."

It wouldn't surprise me to see a mix of base fee for regular content and then an on-demand fee for "premium" content. Heck. HBO could do that now and sell HBO Now for non-current seasons for some price less than what they would sell it for past seasons and the current new programs.

Hooray for Verizon for trying to challenge the fucked up cable system. Maybe, just maybe, they see end of "cable" as a thing when anything can be streamed instead and want to stave this off by making at least kind of sane channel choices available.

Well, kind of. I think they made a lot of this mess for themselves. I think the TV channel sources saw the cable companies successfully ratchet up the prices continuously and figured they needed to be in on that money bandwagon. Enter in all the must-carry bundles and tier requirements and all the bullshit that got us to 800 channels of nothing for $150/month (and not even HBO, damnit).

And the cable companies didn't care because they could just pass off the costs to their customers through ever higher prices and announce "Wow! We've added even more high value content, ESPN Classic 4 -- all those great historic bocce tournaments from the 1950s".

And both the channel providers and the cable companies got fat and sassy.

And now everyone hates cable, hates paying $150/month for a bunch of channels they never watch and is dropping it as fast as they can.

Since you're using "spare" energy which you can generate "for free" does the specific efficiency even matter? The efficiency of not using the energy is zero.

The only efficiency that seems to matter is the money cost of the equipment relative to the value of the produced synthetic fuel.

If you have 10 wind turbines and on a windy day you can only use the power from 5 of them, you would probably brake the other 5. The only cost to turning them for synthetic fuel usage is the wear associated with having them turn. I don't know how significant this is -- maybe they aren't designed for a 25 year lifespan of continuous rotation, maybe all those wind surveys and grid analysis they do get plugged into the engineering so that they can say the finished product has a 25 year lifespan because they know they will be idle/braked for 15 of those years.

Thus the free power is a lot less free because it will wear your turbines out much faster because you're spinning them more than for grid power.

What's the biochemistry associated with aspartame or sucralose and an insulin response?

AFAIK, artificial sweeteners trick the tongue into tasting sweet but don't contain the chemistry (namely sugar) to induce an insulin response.

Now, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen (insert complex biochemistry here) and I wonder if there is possibly some kind of adaptive learned response associated with the taste of something sweet triggering it, sort of like a Pavlovian response. Or maybe there is some indirect connection with our taste buds and our insulin response -- it's not hard to see where taste and an instantaneous biological response would be beneficial, either in helping us reject poisons or in making some foods more quickly absorbed.

It also makes me wonder if could be un-learned -- if a person never ate anything sweet tasting that had sugars, would the body stop associating the taste of something sweet with an insulin response if there wasn't a corresponding increase in blood sugar?

It's easy to talk about material goods as being "unnecessary" especially if they do not contribute to one's physical safety or health, like shelter, food and water.

For better or for worse, though, we are a consumer society and some things almost start to seem to become needs not because they contribute to our physical safety or health but because they contribute to our ability to integrate socially.

You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one. You will not be able to participate in group dynamics or posses the same social information as other people.

The same thing could be said (more tentatively, because there are other outlets) about Netflix. If you're not able to engage with people socially because you are unaware of the types of programs they consume and cannot participate in discussions about them you are also hindered in group dynamics.

Outside the electronics/media sphere, you can make similar judgements about clothes. You don't "need" clothes that fit a specific fashion or brand paradigm -- you can buy used clothes or dollar store clothes and meet the minimal functional needs for clothing. But style and manner of dress is very important for engaging in peer groups, and like it or not people are in/excluded or find it easier or harder to engage in social activities if their mode of dress is compatible with their peer groups.

Now it's easy to make a lot of value judgements -- especially about social networking (the companies, phenomenon, etc) -- but their existence, usage and impact on social life is a reality and at some point I think some of these things become needs for reasonable social integration. Excluding them because they don't meet some minimalist description of "need" starts to sound myopic and mean spirited because I don't know anyone who just lives based on minimal need.

1) Ability to print life size
2) Ability to print with a jointed endoskeleton and soft, skin-like silicone body around endoskeleton
3) Ability to generate 3D model from 2D photos (especially extreme telephoto photos)
4) Shame-free "plain brown wrapper" shipping option

The summary seems to indicate that the value of "Stellarwind" wasn't clear because it was one of many sources and few had access to it, not that all NSA spying was seen as ineffective.

The NSA does so much spying that it seems like it would be hard to ever calculate the marginal value of each additional unit of spying. Probably more so because of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of clandestine information and the need to develop multiple sources to achieve any kind of confidence about a particular conclusion or piece of information.

The latter bit is probably what leads to never-ending development of new data sources and methods, especially as each new spying method becomes less and less specific and requires more and more analysis to tease out information. Call metadata doesn't tell you what was discussed or necessarily who was called. You need parallel data from some other source to tell you who is associated with those numbers, where they were, etc.

I've had one problem with my 6 Plus which was annoying enough to care about, crashing Safari when rotating the phone from portrait to landscape once a certain amount of tabs were open. Googling the problem I found a couple of threads on Apple's support web site, so it appears not to have been just my experience.

The fix with the initial release was to close all tabs (an annoying task in Safari), as there is no "close all tabs" function. I don't know that it's been a problem in 8.3 so far, and it seemed to be better in 8.2.

I didn't experience the issue with Chrome or with other apps, just Safari. I suspected something wonky with the nitro js engine improvements and the 6 Plus display size as occasionally not long before crashing would occur, js-heavy apps rotated web pages would not respond to screen taps or would respond in the wrong place as if the running js code didn't have valid screen dimensions for portrait.

I theorized that closing tabs also nuked cached nitro-compiled js code so that subsequent page views didn't have issues.

Other than that, my 6 Plus has just worked. Historically, I've had to reboot my iPhones to fix a random issue with phone calls more than any other problem and that's been very rare and probably less often than power cycling it for other reasons, like airport security.