Look, the 1% are jerks, honestly - but if you want to use the 1% as tools to grow the economy, or even just to generate tax revenue, you have to understand that they are independent people with their own incentives. You can't just expect them to not care and do nothing when you tell them you're going to take their money.

The US tax on repatriating foreign profits is a great way to keep companies spending more of their money overseas and less in America - and, in case you don't know any recent college graduates who remain woefully unemployed, and haven't noticed - we really don't need that to be any harder than it already is.

(That said, the 80% figure cited above is too high, it's true.)

You leave out the role of WWII-era wage controls in the formation of the current system - when a maximum wage was capped at $N, a company could still compete for the best workers on health care and other related benefits.

Thanks again, FDR!

You miss the obvious question of why do we have this nonsensical tax treatment for employer healthcare, let alone these ridiculous employer-oriented health-care coverage mandates? What we should have done all along is to remove the special tax treatment, let individuals buy their own healthcare, and then have an meaningful honest debate about whether or not we want to be more or less socialist about directing federal funds towards covering people who still can't afford it. Then you don't have to strong-arm anyone into doing anything (at least not any more than taxes in general), and exempt religious organizations remain exempt, and can do whatever the heck they want, in compliance with the likes of the First Amendment, the 1999 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Hosanna-Tabor vs EEOC.

But no, this is really about waging the culture wars, pleasing the Planned Parenthood lobby and rubbing it in the face of the Catholic Church.

Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.

I've lived in San Francisco and visited for more than just "over Christmas" when traffic is reduced and ridership is depressed. Muni actually kind of sucks. Worlds ahead of the rest of the US, mind you, but pretty bad. Its reliability is legendary... legendarily bad.

It's not like it couldn't be better, but the government agency and the union are both pretty dysfunctional. You'd think that a bunch of professional tree-huggers who hate cars, like they purport to elect in these parts, would actually care about pulling off a decent transit system, but at the end of the day it seems they care more about talking the talk and sending more money to the transit union (who are, of course, highly involved in politics as well). And don't even get me started on the pissing contest of San Jose vs San Francisco, Caltrain/VTA vs BART, that's apparently been going on for decades.

In the olden days they called a strong adherence to "procedure" something else, at least in the public sphere - the rule of law. The great thing about that ideal is that the law applies to everyone, popular or unpopular, powerful or not. England's been under some measure of "the rule of law" since the signing of the Magna Carta, and even the King was at least partially subject. It can be a powerful force for justice, peace, and prosperity.

Which isn't to say that it's entirely perfect, but rather that before you go piss on it, you ought to spare a moment to understand and respect what it is and nuance your opinion instead of making snide remarks about those stupid British.

Programming is one field where you can say "screw their degree" and just ask someone to write little pieces of code and talk about system design with a toy problem, and then get a reasonably good sense of how competent they are. Essentially this is a simulation of the position they're going to be hired for. It's not perfect, of course, but it'll be worlds better than many other fields. And, of course, some programming questions can reveal more than others.

It seems like most of the things they're talking about with computer-automated simulations are only likely to be effective for grunt work, though. Myself, I'd rather work on software to run robots than software to test how robot-like people can be. :P

It occurred to me the other day that, while I have been programming and working with network monitoring tools and the like for a while, and I can get an email alert (or text message) whenever a piece of equipment goes down, the rest of the world doesn't have that sort of capability. A big chunk of of California Highway 1 could fall into the ocean, and people could fall off after it, and no one would notice until someone called it in. If my hard disk is on fire, I can get a message, but if the woods are on fire, you need to wait for someone to see the smoke.

Sensors and the like are pretty awesome to have.

Tiny Tower is in the class of games which I personally think of as "real-time impatience machines". There are a couple of iffy mechanics at work, but the most insidious is the dual-currency model. One currency (coins) you get by playing normally. The other (Towerbucks), which makes useful things happen faster, you only get occasionally or at random, but they can be bought with real money. So the point of the game is essentially to addict you and then make you impatient enough to spend real money.

I hate this game mechanic.

I was riding Caltrain the week that the whole "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" thing went down, and met some Zynga employees. The good news is that it didn't damage morale too much; the bad news is that it's because said employees had a rather mercenary holding-out-for-the-big-bucks attitude of "as long as it doesn't happen to me". Sounds like they were a perfect fit.

Chrome sacrifices operating-system paradigms to build Google's brand; you are meant to look at the shiny colors and think 'yay google! google google google.'.

Operating-system-style widgets and the like make sense for users, but Google makes Chrome for the benefit of Google first and users second.

While it is indeed laughable and sad that these unprepared devices were attached to the Internet, it is also worth highlighting that being detached from the Internet is not itself a pancaea. Stuxnet was able to damage Iranian uranium centrifuges without those centrifuges ever being attached to the Internet.

But yes, detaching them further is a very good plan.

Give it another few years for Obamacare to come all the way online, and there may well be. ;)

(oblig. "I'll probably get modded down for this.")

Usually after the prototype the modern inventor will need to raise money to set up factories and production lines to make working devices. (Possibly outsourced, but they'll still want money up front.) This is the purpose of venture capital, IPOs, and the like.

From what I've heard, if you're doing geothermal power where you squirt water down into layers of rock, you're already going to have to deal with tons of obnoxious dissolved minerals all over the place. I'm not sure whether salt would make it much worse.