>> Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders..

It's not their fault for being evil. They were made that way. We should let them screw us. It's just how they do things.

China has set its tariffs, exchange rates, rules and standards to tilt the game in favor of employing Chinese labor for producing manufactured goods and for making exporters selling to China pay to compete. We aren't doing that. We protect the big native industries like agriculture which have real political clout and can't be outsourced and we consciously knock down any and all barriers to outsourcing our manufacturing because this feeds the bottom line of multinational manufacturers (in the short term).

By the way, those big Ag. industries also employ hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, which keeps their costs down. This also is intentional. It's why we don't have real immigration reform. We have huge oil subsidies and expensive health care because all of the laws are written to make profits flow up. It's not a conspiracy. It's just a reflection of the fact that money naturally concentrates at the top and it is so easy to buy the type of legislation (or lack thereof) that can distort markets and help the money keep flowing up. Add in the hidden tax of inflation on everyone, the enormous tax on investors of the privileged super-connected Wall Streeters and the huge money sink that is the military-industrial complex and it's fairly easy to see that we're vacuuming cash out of the politically powerless middle and lower classes into the pockets of the politically connected upper class. All of the economic data of the last 30 years supports this. The richest 10% owns over half of all assets. Working class wages have fallen down a hill for the past 35 years (especially when you count that we've nearly doubled the available labor pool by putting women to work!). Our standard of living has fallen while our personal, government and corporate debts have ballooned. Big business thrives by setting the rules in favor of itself and against the smaller up-and-comers.

I used to believe that this just wasn't the case. I used to believe 100% in the unregulated free market. Perhaps I still do, but the reality today is that we're regulating and lawyering ourselves into oblivion. To get back to the original point: if we hadn't spent the last 30 years outrageously inflating the cost of our own labor (see all the reasons above) and knocking down every obstacle to outsourcing it abroad, our stores would be more than half-full with goods that are made in USA. Even with all the ridiculous overhead that we've imposed on ourselves, US labor isn't completely uncompetitive. We have more skilled workers than anywhere in the world. If the cost of healthcare for employees were to be cut from 17% of GDP to the perfectly adequate 7%; if we didn't pay outrageous insurance rates at every turn because of a legal system gone mad; if we didn't have huge unnecessary tax rates to pay for ridiculous military boondoggles, big industry subsidies and misguided regulation; if we didn't spend so much money just in transaction costs and debt maintenance imposed by Wall Street leeches, we'd have much cheaper labor and capital. We'd have competitive labor and capital. All of these things are costs in and of themselves and they compound each other.

Give me a break? You buy this drivel? You just made the case that because our system is set-up to externalize as many costs as possible in favor of short-term profit, it must be OK. So goes the thinking of the rest of the idiots who have driven the economy off a cliff: "It's not illegal, so it must be OK." In the technology world, we have an entire industry dedicated to figuring out the impact of technological change on society and the human implications of that change. It's called Science Fiction. We think about what could happen; what could go wrong; what could go right and we write millions of stories about it. Of course many of these stories are unrealistic, but they're interesting and many have a kernel of truth. It plants seeds in our minds and we start to think about the implications of things like unfettered AI, bioengineering, nuclear arms and the expansion of humanity into new worlds where we are divided by vast chasms of time, space, environment and genetics. I'm not saying that we're somehow more moral or more responsible because Sci Fi exists. However, we have a clue and our awareness is heightened and we aren't completely blind to our own collective destiny. We do what we do because at some level we love it. Maybe the investment bankers and CEOs of the world love what they do too, but since the stakes are so high, the more likely motivating factor is just plain greed. There is no room for self-reflection in avaricious minds.

China is not an evil empire. But it has shown a tendency to systematically suppress the lives of the lower classes in favor of the ruling classes for thousands of years. There's little evidence that this is different today. So many of the values we claim to hold dear are antithetical to their way of life. Read, for instance, stories about Chinese Mothering to see where the individual is repressed to favor some other goal of more immediate and concrete utility. If mothers are forcing their wills relentlessly on their children all over China, what lessons does the Chinese ruling class take to it's job of governing and use of its increasing power? Since most of us aren't in the ruling class, we have a lot to lose if they become the next hegemony.

It's taken a lot of hard, expensive work and lives were lost in developing the technologies that gave us the edge to "win" the cold war. Now we're bartering this long-term advantage for some short-term profits? And you say this is justified? I see this as a sign that we're circling the drain. Our grandparents' generation would recognize this for what it is: Treason.

First of all, it’s not useful to dismiss this guy because he’s not a climatologist. As an R&D engineer who works with everyone from technicians to theoretical physicists and mathematicians, I can tell you that the biggest difference between equally talented minds is not in the job they do, but the mindset of the person doing the work. There are plenty of theoretical engineers and practical physicists. Titles don't really have as much meaning as we tend to give them when it comes to the credibility of a source.

Secondly, I would argue that there are many, many hard problems that we must deal with as a society this century. They include (in no particular order):

• Climate Change
• Overpopulation and increased competition for limited and non-renewable resources
• Continuing human-driven mass extinction
• The unchecked rise of authoritarianism
• The world-wide mis-allocation of wealth compounded by the free flow of goods and capital which outmaneuvers traditional regulatory and social checks on vast concentrations of power
• The escalating probability of compound catastrophes due to the weakened social and economic fabric of civilization at a time when we are overdue for several types of natural disaster (volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroid impacts).
• The growing probability of terrorist acts causing large-scale catastrophe due to the continual refinement and broader availability of advanced weapons technologies

I’m sure I’m missing some important ones. These are just generalized root causes that give rise to many particular problems such as the historically-high potential for, and ongoing cost of disease epidemics (e.g. AIDS, malaria), due to population density and the mis-allocation of wealth.

We are living in a small, dense, interconnected world where economic borders are vanishing for the wealthy but growing for the poor and middle classes. We have to confront these problems not as nations but as a whole human society. We’re nowhere near that level of integration, but big social and technological changes can happen quickly, which can drive big economic and political changes.

The cost of dealing with climate change is enormous. It’s greater than several years of worldwide economic output. This points to the fact that to best deal with the problems we confront, we’re going to have to balance costs and benefits. We have to live in the real world and prioritize our goals.
I, personally, doubt that we will survive the next century without incurring massive disastrous losses, perhaps catastrophic losses (Disaster is when a large-scale failure occurs. Catastrophe is when failures result in large-scale losses of life). I won’t go as far as saying that all civilization will end. But I believe that billions of lives will be lost and tens of billions more will be oppressed unnecessarily due to our own lack of coordination and abundance of short-sightedness.

The bottom line is that I don’t think that solving the climate change problem is either practical or desirable as a goal by itself in the context of the many other problems which are of greater consequence. These problems must be dealt-with in concert rather than individually if we have a hope of avoiding catastrophe.

Finally, I will say that the complexity argument is not hollow. I have not seen evidence that climate is a less chaotic system than weather. By their nature, chaotic systems cannot be modeled beyond a short horizon. In climatology 100 years is indeed a short horizon, but these models are also supposed to make a lot of predictions which don’t seem to be verifiable except by waiting. Running the models with varied inputs and seeing a statistical convergence doesn’t prove that they model reality, only that the models produce convergent results. Running them backwards doesn’t really produce meaningful results either. We have constructed useful weather models by testing them against reality repeatedly for decades. There is a huge body of work that has gone into improving them. While some of that work is directly relevant to climate prediction, we just don’t have the luxury of having tested our climate models against as many inputs and scenarios as we have in testing our weather models. Backtesting is only as accurate as our climate data is. Unfortunately, the quality of most of the historical data is highly controversial. I’m not coming down on the side of the skeptics or the “believers”. I’m just pointing out that the skeptics are not simply kooks. They have good points and it is premature the call the whole matter settled.

When everyone buys index funds, the index managers have huge leverage to manipulate. The high freq traders have more leverage to manipulate the fund traders. The market as a whole becomes more correlated. There's nothing wrong with index investing, but if everyone does a lot of index investing, at some point you are looking into a pricing hall of mirrors instead of a working market and it takes fewer and smaller non-conforming players get enough leverage to tilt the whole applecart. We already see the effects of this from the studies that show that the markets are now more correlated than before the popularity of the index funds.

If you want to limit the effects of rogue players, don't just ignore them. Prohibit their abuses. The 5-second trade granularity mentioned above seems like a good start.

I'm not usually one to spout the standard talking points but:
1) All the harm caused by the leaks was theoretical. Not one person or operation has been shown to be harmed by this leak in any real way.
2) Whereas actual corruption, destruction and death on a massive scale have been caused by the interminable Afghan and Iraqi wars that have been prosecuted badly and under false pretenses and with a constant cover of official lies and minimal scrutiny by mainstream media.

I hope Palin truly is unelectable. She has no understanding of anything beyond how to present the rhetoric handed to her by her handlers and act the part of a figurehead. Here's to hoping that the worst damage she can do is as a lightning-rod and a distraction from the real issues. Lord help us if she gets and keeps any official power.

Some of the movies that would seem to benefit most from 3D, don't work out in practice. Kids movies would be obvious winners here, but last time I took my 4-year-old nephew to see a 3D movie we had to leave early because the glasses didn't fit his head. When they keep falling off, you can't watch the movie and when you don't have them on, it's mostly just a blur. We got our money back. Avatar was pretty good in 3D/IMAX, though I'm not sure it wouldn't be just as good in just IMAX.

The things you just mentioned are all things that all sides agree are basic services. They're not usually up for debate. Also, all but one are part of local and state government. You start talking about socialism when the government interferes in the private economy to achieve what are ostensibly social gains that can't otherwise be practically made. However, it's pretty obvious in this case that there's basically no social gain. It's an outright power grab. It's probably illegal. So, while it's not classically socialism, it is flying under that banner. Are you happier with fascism? Does arguing over what to call this horrible behavior do anything to stop it?

Increasingly, I'd just like to vote for no one. We can just fire the incumbent and leave the position vacant. It's time to down-size. Let the senate nominate some key positions such as secretary of state. Let the people vote directly on the budget electronically. It's time to start lopping off the cancerous tentacles of the leviathan.

Here's why the odds-makers are wrong: They assume that the people at the UN know something. As in anything at all. It's just the opposite.

It's not that the end of humanity is on its way. It's the end of this economy. At some point, everyone will come to realize:

1. That the nation's debt, is only getting bigger, and
2. That our economy is not going to grow enough to even keep station with current levels, much less the exploding debt we are taking on.
3. That most of the wealth in the nation is concentrated at the top more densely than any other time in our history (the top 1% wealthiest people own 2/3 of all US assets), and
4. That most of the pain (the tab for the bills coming due) is going to be laid on the middle class, not on the elites at the top.

There's not going to be a jobs recovery. A huge big chunk of our economy was dedicated to developing real estate and financing the sale of that development. The value of real estate is just not coming back for decades. Those jobs are permanently gone, just like the textile jobs of yore. There are no replacements in services or in manufacturing. Our technology edge is eroding and as it vanishes, so too will the production of the remaining expensive manufactured goods that we make here.

Gold ATMs are not useful except in the most dire emergencies. If you need to use one, it's already too late. No one is going to sell gold in the midst of a currency crisis. These things exist to take advantage of the fool. The reason they will make money is that even a fool can see that there is a crisis coming, while very few have any good plan for dealing with it.

Lets put this in simple terms. Imagine you're a farmer with 30 acres. It takes 20 acres to feed your family. 66% of the crop takes care of your immediate needs and 33% goes to savings and taxes. At a rate of 25%, the government takes 1/4 of your crop and you have 9% for savings. The government is having a bad year and decides to raise taxes. The rate is going up from 25% to 30%. No problem, you say. That leaves 3.3% of what you farm as a buffer to sell and use for savings. Last year you saved your profits to eventually invest in new equipment that will increase your yields by 25%. You can't buy that equipment this year because you won't have enough savings. The economy doesn't grow. Equipment doesn't get bought, crop yields don't increase and you're less secure against bad weather and rising costs. What about when the taxes go up to 35%? Now you can't feed your family because you've got less than two acres for yourself. You dip into savings or you take hand-outs or you give-up farming. But that's not how it works, you say. The government taxes income for individuals and profits for businesses. Taxing income is just like taking 25% of the farmer's crop instead of 25% of the farmer's profits. Your work isn't profit. It's time and effort that belongs to you and there's no provision for the government to have any right to it. When taxes are too high, the economy suffers and eventually suffocates. Government can't grow the economy, It can only get out of the way to let the economy grow. This means that the government can't really help you. Every benefit you get means we all lose something greater and we sacrifice future growth.

Power corrupts, hence most authorities are actually greedy grown-up children.

Most parents love their children and a lot don't use their authority wisely. Do your authorities, ne masters, love you?

Not to put a damper on all of the AI / Singularity frenzy, but one of the big unsolved problems of the future is the inefficiency of artificial systems. Bio systems have evolved over millennia in constant competition for resources. Natural systems make the most use out of the available matter and energy. Manufactured systems have a life cycle that is many orders of magnitude less efficient than bio systems. They use exotic materials in industrial processes that are energy intensive. Imagine being a creature that relies on large amounts of Indium, Gallium and Arsenic, megawatts of energy and so many exotic chemicals to repair one's self and to reproduce. Our current technology just isn't near close enough for an explosion of AI machines. Without reproduction, these machines are unlikely to spread beyond the solar system in numbers that will make them easily visible to SETI. That means that biological intelligence has the potential for a long history ahead.

Can I use it to show ads only to people I know? Those ads could be ... instant messages, announcements or maybe just reminders to my wife not to put my favorite shirt in the dryer.