In the name of improving communication, I would even go so far as to split team members up and spread them around the office so they can better mingle with other groups in your supply / input / process / output / customer chain.

You are definitely manager material.

Did it ever occur to you that if someone actually needs to communicate with someone else they can get up out of their chair and go talk to the other person? Or use that old-fashioned thing called a "telephone"?

It's true. Instead of being a fraud, like Ms. Video Blogger, she's in a place where actual, real medieval misogynists do things like actually kill women for trying to have a real life. Yes, fielding trollish tweets is definitely worse than being shot in the head. Or being stoned for having been raped. Or having acid thrown in your face. Or having your teacher burned alive in front of you before you are gang raped. Or having a hundred of your fellow students killed for being part of a culture that isn't sufficiently backing a particular jihadist nutcase faction. Or being dragged off into the African jungle to be rented out as a twelve year old wife. Yeah, those tweets are for sure worse than that sort of stuff.

We don't know how many Universes exist in some sense, and it's quite reasonable that infinitely many do, with all possible variations. (This is, of course, unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, but if true it would completely nullify the divine argument.)

So, you'd nullify the divine argument by making another argument that is every bit as specious as the one you're nullifying?

Me, I'll pass on the subject. One of the following cases is true:

1) there is one God.

2) there is more than one God

3) there are zero Gods

When we get more evidence that any of these propositions is true, I'll change my behaviour to match the evidence.

And no, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Over the telephone?

*ring*ring* This guy sounds exactly like Warren Buffett! I better solve his tech support problems right away.

I'm in the middle class. I don't know who the VIPs are in my culture, and would not be able to identify them unless they all wore name badges. This is probably because I don't give a shit.

Obviously the NSA is protecting us for terrorists.

And if we don't offer anything they want because it's not profitable for us to produce products for those markets? Well the magic free market fairy fly over and correct it?

There are plenty of cultures outside of the US where owning property and a house is a sign of affluence and is a lifetime dream for some people. Having to own a car on top of that is just gravy.

For people that don't want to drive, there isn't much I can do to convince you. You might be better off in Paris, London, or even Vancouver than the US. (maybe NYC, if you can find an affordable place to live)

Healthcare covers your partner and your children. It may or may not cover your elderly parents depending on which company and which state.

There are regions other than Europe. There's South America, Central America, East Asia, India, ...
There's probably a reason why immigration to the US from Western Europe is small and the annual quotas aren't usually met, while the quotas for India are usually met by February. My guess is that Europe is already a nice place, and it's more of a lateral move for Europeans to work in the US.

Cost of living in the US is generally lower than in EU. There are certainly regions where it is high, but the same could be said about Europe. (I could afford Poland better than I could afford France)

I agree with you there. But plenty of folks find reasons to go forward with it anyways. Even with the horrible painful paperwork for a visa.

zero [job] growth in ag. negative [job] growth in manufacturing.

Making piles of money for a small number of industry owners doesn't count as growth, when that wealth is not distributed to middle and lower classes. If you want to count an entire nation as a monolithic unit and sum up all the numbers at the bottom line, then go ahead. I'm not sure what you can prove when you are done doing that though. I choose to view a nation as a collection of individuals who all have to make a living for the organism as a whole to thrive.

Happy New Year.

Countries in a population decline have some serious problems to solve, with no easy answers. Thanks to immigration we have growth, which is a problem that has been dealt with [somewhat] successfully for hundreds of years.

Hopefully I can be promoted to manager, sell my house, move into a cheap apartment, or switch careers.

You mean they'll start paying people more than minimum wage to flip burgers?

But hyperbole aside, there is some truth in what you say. But I think the key here is that rather than allowing everyone to show up and work for any price, there are a some hoops to jump through for foreign workers to live and work in the US. Hopefully we operate the process at a controller rate where we can absorb the new workers and adapt to changes in our economy and careers.

Google (and Microsoft, and Qualcomm, and IBM, and ...) are trying to recreate the technological and commercial success that came out of places like Bell Labs. One of the big lessons learned is that you need to have some open ended development projects to allow for discovery and invention. You can't have profit-driving innovation without the profit-less starting point of invention. Someone else may make more money off of your invention, but you have to chose either the risks of stagnation or the risks of competition.

Google's big mistake here is not working on projects without an obvious commercial payoff. Their big mistake is trying to incubate these blue sky R&D projects in the cultural and managerial environment of their profit making businesses. Everything looks and feels like a vanity project rather than serious forward looking R&D. It's a good idea to geographically separate your board and upper management from your "outside-the-box" R&D lab by a few thousand miles.

I'd pay up to 50% more for a car I didn't have to drive. Maybe more if it took me to work, maybe I could send it home so my wife and/or kids could use during the day when I'm away at work.

This.

My family has three cars. if one of them was capable of taking me to work, then going home to be available to the rest of the family the rest of the day, I could cut back to two cars.

So, even if they cost 50% more (which I don't believe they will - the hardware will tend toward the trivial like all computer hardware), they'd be, at worst, breakeven on costs for me.

And I'd have extra time to do things worthwhile instead of staring through a "dirty pane of silica glass" watching all the other potential lunatics around me....

So, if you had $30K and were in the market for a car, you would buy a driverless car that cost a lot more than $30K? I think what you are really saying is that if there were driverless cars available, you would not buy one, since you are not in the market for a car, and you cannot afford a car....which is more or less what the writer of the article said.

How often does the thief in the party actually steal from team-mates in the electronic versions? Yet our team had a thief character who would do exactly that -- swipe anything that wasn't nailed down -- and sometimes use a crowbar if it was. :)

Just curious - did y'all treat your Party thief like any other (NPC) thief? Or did he get special treatment because he was part of the Party?