What is 'general intelligence'? (Anything like Colonel Panic?)

Self-metaprogramming, basically. You are smart if you can repurpose existing neural circuits to handle new problems (because that way your consciousness is freed to consider things like consequences, and specialized circuit is of course faster than general-purpose one), you learn fast if you can build such circuits fast, and you are insightful if you can examine your own mental subroutines and how they work - if you actually learn to reprogram them consciously you'll likely find a new religion or something.

It does not follow that being able to understand calculus gives you peace, happiness and longevity.

70 years is equivalent to 411,222,120,000,000 miles. It might not actually be longer, but it sure sounds bigger :).

It's not a debate that I mean to stir up 3-deep in a Slashdot thread, but just to say that the vast majority of people at most places on the political spectrum agree: Those that have the ability to succeed, should have the opportunity to. It's just the mechanics they disagree on that are sometimes, sadly, mutually exclusive.

The disagreement is about what happens to those who won't succeed, to Joe Average and Joe Hobo. Currently, Joe Average's position is getting worse and worse, which is a huge problem because modern economy can't actually work without them having money to act as consumers. And as the economy stalls and enters a tailspin, Joe Succesful shifts the blame to Joe Hobo, closing his eyes from the approaching ground because doing something about it would require taking a break from his personal interests to visit the cockpit, and getting Joe Average to get along with it because pretending bad things only happen to deserving people is a pleasant fantasy.

Of course such situations are always rectified eventually, the only question remains whether it's by recycling the wreckage.

Not anymore. Google now returns results which don't always have all the obligatory words in the page, though it does tell you if some are missing.

Where did they claim to be playing in the big leagues? And yes, there is a niche for microsatellite launch services. Your unnecessarily grumpy comments are largely correct, but you've missed the whole point of the operation, which is cost. Virgin's LauncherOne is aiming for $10m per launch, these guys are claiming half that price.

I suspect the Numberphile videos about shuffling inspired this article.

I would be ok with removing all tax exempt statuses from churches as long as charity work was deductible for them.

Why should charity be deductible, for churches or anyone? You want to give your money to the poor, go ahead; but why should that exempt you from paying your share of the rent?

Remove all special treatment for religions, so the state can get out of the business of judging the sincerity of anyone's convictions, which it is absolutely unsuited for. And stop letting people use "charity" as a tax dodge.

"Making" should be the profit, not the gross revenue brought in by station operaton. "Revenue" and "profit" get mixed in the minds of many people. They are not the same. When I worked for a 3 KW FM station as an intern years go, all the "revenue" went for operating costs of the station: building rent, transmitter land rent, property taxes, salaries (why do you think they liked a zero-dollar intern?), electricity, cost of network fees, consulting engineers (to conduct the measurements the FCC requires for the station "public files",) and all the rest. Most of the "giveaways" were paid for by the people buying advertising time, not the station itself. Those "free" tickets to concerts were contributed by the concert promoters to add some weight to their ad time. Sometimes the station operated at a loss, which is why the station owners had other businesses to prop up the station during lean times. It wasn't a hobby, but no one was getting rich from the operation of the station. Helping to keeping the money coming was the SBA channel sending out background music to the stores in town. All those tapes were rented, not purchased, because royalties had to be paid on that music coming from the ceiling of your local supermarket.

Wouldn't it be better to do things that help all business, like lower taxes and improve infrastructure,

No, because that's not possible. Infrastructure costs money to build and maintain. You can have low taxes or good infrastructure but not both.

Of course there's always the third option of inheriting decent infrastructure from your parents and refusing to maintain it, trusting it to last your lifetime without. That way you can have low taxes and civilization at the cost of screwing future generations.

This is only slightly funny. I've some colleagues with deaf children who came under enormous social pressure for getting cochlear implants for their children.

People develop subcultures over various real or imaginary similarities or differences, and once created identity with these subcultures. A deaf person who's part of "deaf subculture" would lose the part of themselves they've invested in it if they had their hearing fixed. The same happens if the subculture disappears for any other reason, for example because no new members enter. A solution is altering the subculture so it no longer requires continued deafness as membership requirement; maybe "ex-deaf" or "hearing assisted" could be viable directions?

AFAIK there's no similar colorblind subculture, so there shouldn't be a problem with treating it as a mere medical condition - which might still not make it a good idea to risk gene therapy to fix it, but that's a separate issue.

Why would any Republican be afraid of HRC? She is one in all but name.

That's precisely why. The core of tribal politics is that the results don't matter as much as who gets them. A Republican in all but name could potentially steal some of their supporters, weakening the Party.

For the last 26 years or so, I've been making electronic copies of my records. The media changes, the location does not. My current scheme is to burn financial records onto CD-ROM on two pieces of archival media. One goes into my local at-home fireproof safe. One goes into my safe-deposit box at my neighborhood bank.

Work backup is a little trickier. For a long time I was using tape backup, upgrading to larger capacity as the new drives came out. Then I started burning multiple DVD-ROM disk sets. I was able to start using a single pair of DVD+R(DL) when the cost came down. Again, one set goes into the at-home fireproof safe, the other to the safe deposit box.

I also use USB hard drives for in-office backup. I use Linux, so I formatted a 3-TB drive as ext4. I then use rsync to update the drive during projects at regular intervals.

The cloud? I have some people who insist I use Github and Dropbox. Github is fine for working projects, but I wouldn't depend on them keeping stuff forever -- regular backups of the working projects is the rule for me. Dropbox was going just fine until it broke completely when I upgraded my systems to CentOS 7.0 (and now 7.1). Almost useless. I'm hoping Dropbox will get a fix for this soon.

Life tip: Record your financial records on media separate from your other backups. You can then pitch the media after the statute of limitations expires (7 years for US).

War should be costly, difficult, and sap your resources. Otherwise you make mass killing far too easy.

So what happens when you do have a costly, difficult war that saps your resources? Why propaganda of course! And the effects of that propaganda don't simply go away when the war is done. Neither will the military-industrial complex which now represents a huge proportion of your GDP. A costly war requires the entire society to be reshaped around it, and thus acquires a life of its own, which lasts way beyond the cessation of hostilities. The ghost of World War I persisted and took shape again in Soviet Union whose economy was modeled after wartime Germany, then World War II, then in Cold War and its sub-conflicts, and is currently busy guiding Russia in Ukraine.

No, wars should be as cheap and easy as possible, because the less you have to worry about the economic or domestic political effects the more you can worry about things like casualties and global political effects. Also: "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." Well, with drones you can take the less ruthless option, since you're no longer risking your own troops but a soulless industial automat, and thus can minimize civilian - or even enemy combatant - casualties.

The less war disturbs a society, the less likely it's to become an essential part of the culture of that society. Just look at Israel-Arab conflict in the Middle East for a good example of a war that's basically chronic and can't end without the societies in question undergoing at least minor cultural revolutions, because at this point it's an essential part of their mythology - people's idea of what it means to live in Middle East.

I bet if Washington state lowered it's tax rate to equal Nevada's MS would consider relocating MS licensing group back to Washington State...

And then Nevada lowers its tax rate to get it back, and then it's Washington's turn again, the end result being that Microsoft pays a nominal tax if any at all. And since that means other people and companies must pay more to make up the difference, their effective tax rate goes up, they do the same, and ultimately all tax burden gets concentrated on those too poor to move. But of course they can't pay, so the state must cut education, infrastructure maintenance, law enforcement, etc. And that, in turn, makes the state an even less attractive location for business.

It's simply another manifestation of the illness that's killing capitalism. But at least the process of decay is fascinating to watch, as pathological patterns become the norm and eat away the structure of society. Sooner or later it's frayed enough that some crisis launches the final domino effect of collapse.

How about it Washington state, do you want the tax revenues or the talking point against MS?

Washington state wants to survive, just like any living thing. Unfortunately, being a cultural organism rather than biological one limits its options, since it must be careful not to discredit the very mythology that justifies its own existence. And in the US, the mythology of the nation has been tightly coupled with the mythology of capitalism. Untangling them or altering capitalism to less toxic form is a job for the prophetic archetype; Washington state can do little but play for time and hope one appears before it runs out.

Of course, the whole reason prophets are so rare is because you always run the risk of being one of those things found wanting and cast out, but at some point the prevalent mythology of the society has been exhausted of its possibilities so there's little choice except to get a new one or die.

Well, if you'd lay off the cannabis, maybe you'd finally pass calculus :)

You can never pass calculus. By the time you get where it was when you started, the field has advanced.

Society is ethically obligated to take care of its own, it's part of the social contract. So no, evolution won't take care of them, the tax payers will.

This might surprise you, but us taxpayers also want entertainment. Such entertainment has a cost beyond mere monetary; for example, I might get a concussion while skiing, and that might permanently affect my cognitive functions, and in any case it requires energy to move to and from the resort location and it makes me unavailable for work for a long while.

As it happens, the cost/entertainment ratio of cannabis is very low, so from the point of view of maximum efficiency legislating it is the right thing to do.