There is more truth to it than what you say. A host of companies don't want or need PhD's for 99+% of their jobs. A PhD will automatically be rejected at many of these. Sadly, PhDs seem to expect more and do less actual work from personal experience with quite a few PhDs, the entitlement problem. In general they don't take direction well from people that don't also have PhDs, especially if it's for "grunt" work that needs to be done. I personally wouldn't hire a fresh PhD.

...has a future....

Now if I could only buy a phone, computer, tires or car in such a market and get quality products that at least meet a minimum set of standards.

I guess Texas did

This is true but irrelevant. In a screen shot that has shaped color gradients within a small color range, you can see banding in 24 bit color easily. (24 bit being RGB 8 bit color). You're only using a small portion of the available color, and the limitations of LCD/LED is painfully obvious here as there is no gradient between pixels that you get in other technologies.

You'll find that as you get older, with wife / kids, that those roommates are not going to cut it for you, nor will they like you and your family. This assumes that you join the large segment of society that follows this path. And once you break out of that acceptance mode of dealing with roommates, you find that you'd really rather not deal with them, your comfort level depends upon it.

24bit color isn't enough. 32 bit seems to work. But plasma still looks far better than LED/LCD, even backlit.

Brightness is not the primary problem with LEDs/LCDs. The issues with ghosting, even on 240Hz sets, is still there although much less noticeable than earlier sets. The biggest current issues I have is with color banding and jagged edges. There is no blur effect at the edges of the crystals, you get very sharp lines in gradual tone shaded images. Awful would be too kind a word for this type of picture, unless it's a Van Gogh or something similar. So I guess Panasonic is going to spur me to grab a set before XMas. I've been eying one already. I'm sure that's the entire purpose of this "announcement", since this is the first time any set has even entered the Kuro ballpark in 6+ years.

You are smokin something. $3K per year? A lousy studio in one of the cheaper cities to live in runs $600 per month, utilities included. If you're sharing rent with a bed-sharing partner, the first thing you'd be doing is moving elsewhere, if you can afford it. Food easily runs way more than $1500 / year, unless you like bread and peanut butter or bologna everyday. And for clothes, things that you wear to work will run you a lot more than $200 / year, especially if you have a $2K / year car + gas. Insurance is going to cost you $800 / year most likely, or more. Yes, you're going to have a car, because that $6K / year pad is going to most likely be 10+ miles from anywhere you need to be with no public transport. I knew one group of 5 that drove 70 miles each way, for crappy $20-45K / year jobs, because the cheapest non-leaded pads were going for $1K / month, nothing included within a 30 mile radius. This was many years ago and prices haven't gotten better.

Game theory is generally about modeling situations where there are winning and losing strategies, so that you can pick the winners. People generally want to be with the winners, it's genetically programmed across millions of years. So to expect people to look use game theory and to expect them not to pick a strategy that puts them ahead on average is naive.

Game theory is about individuals or elitist groups winning. It's not about society as a whole winning. Game theory is what the insurance companies have been using to maximize their profits. It certainly isn't helping the people of society.

Think about this, we force hospitals to accept all at their door - they cannot refuse care if such refusal would result in death or significant injury. So essentially we already have base health care. A single payer system for this level of care would have been good. Note that cancer, aids, any other chronic / terminal disease falls outside this level of care. Costs are well-contained, and relatively easy to estimate. This is what ObamaCare should have addressed at its core. Leave the rest for insurance companies, and don't allow pre-existing conditions. There's a few other things they should have done - posted rates by service providers, no individually negotiated rates - same rate for everyone. That would also go a long way to making healthcare a normal business.

But they were tree swinging and jumping, and gauging distances is certainly helped by stereoscopic vision. Being able to discern a branch (or fruit) from a bunch of leaves (pattern) would also be highly useful, and both probably had more to do with our brain development than being able to recognize snakes. It may even have been merely a serendipitous development.

The reason why is as soon as they do - third party vendors can too. Look at what happened when they had "standard" radios, and what's happened to them in the last 15 years. 3rd party car stereos will almost always stick out like a sore thumb now.

Lock-in. Personally, I think there should be a standard mandated connector, like the ODB2, and a simple slide in chassis. After market would be an easy replacement, or with a later year's model if you happen to like some feature that the older one doesn't have.

I'd love to, even though it's not a 2013 Toyota, but this applies to everyone.