Elizabeth Warren's work on "The Two Income Trap" has shown the government's figures on the cost of living to be genocidally wrong. When I say genocidally wrong I mean the absence of children that contributes to "the labor shortage" is due to income redistribution from the middle classes to the increasing centralization of wealth among the upper 1%. Ricardo's "iron law of wages" was formulated in a time when "subsistence" could not cut into replacement reproduction due to the lack of birth control. The conscientious fraction of the population will respond to a lowering of real family income relative to the cost of replacement child rearing by ceasing to have children. This is what Warren's work shows is exactly what happened to the Baby Boomers when it came time for them to plan their families. To further import foreign workers to fill the "labor shortage" when it is already demonstrably the case that lowered _real_ wages has resulted in quasi-genocide of the populations being replaced is no longer excusable as mere ignorance by policy planners, if, indeed, it ever was excusable.

It is symptomatic of where civilization is headed that the respondents most highly rated here at "News for Nerds" -- presumably a technically and scientifically literate sampling of civilization -- exhibit almost scientific literacy regarding Watson's statements.

This reinforces my perception of civilization as more of a eusocial organism than anything resembling an enlightened society. Eusocial organisms, like bee or ant colonies, do exchange information between its members but the information is relatively low bandwidth taking the form of pheromones. Most of the words used to describe Watson, such as "racist" and "sexist" are so loaded with connotation that they are virtually worthless as high bandwidth tokens -- serving more the function of pheromone signaling in eusocial insects: "Not of the hive! Attack!"

You are referring to the climatic memetic demographic prisoner's dilemma. The idea there was to try to have the most primitive form of "meme" imaginable: A speech act which could take one of two states "defect" or "cooperate", in the context of a population which may, or may not, repeat memes and which -- independent of repetition behavior -- may or may not comply with the meme it "hears". Tit for tat during iteration of the PD was simulated by allowing a variation in which the behavior (cooperate or defect) was based on what the organism had last experienced, as opposed to what the organism had last "heard". The "climate" was the degree to which the environment provided "food" to make up for loss of points in the PD score keeping.

The notion that one can _reliably_ "experience" defection _as_ defection is what I claim is an unrealistic assumption -- deception being such a central strategy in evolution -- hence tit for tat is a poor assumption.

The notion that "tit for tat" is relevant to evolution in the iterated prisoner's assumes that defection is detected -- an unrealistic assumption. The only reliable evolutionary system in which cooperation is sustainable is one in which the replicators (genetic and memetic) share a common fate aka vertical transmission. This is why the meiotic lottery works in multicellular sexual species and it is how symbiosis between species can evolve in ecologies where migration is restricted -- migration being the origin of the evolution of virulence via horizontal transmission. However, since restricting migration is not practical in much of nature, there is an "optimal virulence" in which a replicator tests the limits of its ability to, in essence, "take the money and run", and exploits to that limit.

Due to caching, downloading Javascript pays off with faster response if you hit the same site enough times. Neither the article nor the Catchpoint Systems website say how many times they hit the same site, let alone how many times a customer is expected to hit the same site so essentially this article is fluff piece.

When the response of industry leaders and Congress to the collapse in the jobs market of 2000 was to increase H-1b worker visas, it should have been a signal to any sane youngster US citizen (who wasn't an Asian immigrant) to steer clear of the IT industry. Yes, there are jobs that are well paying and yes there are a lot of US citizens, even older US citizens, who are getting them despite the insane guest worker policies pursued by Asian ethnic nepotism taking over Fortune 1000 IT hiring authority.

But think about the way casinos operate: When someone wins at the slots, the machines make lots of noise but when someone loses at slots, there is dead silence.

Since 2002 he was only partly employed. In 2009 he recollected

Essentially I have been officially unemployed for not quite five years now. There's never enough funding.

If you are a non-Asian US citizen, there are better ways of terminating your bloodline than getting a degree in IT, such as suicide bombing some of the industry leaders that expanded the H-1b visa program when the jobs market collapsed in 2000.

Sortocracy is sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. It is the only political system that allows people to escape bad governance: People can vote with their feet.

Any attempt to "reform the political process" is doomed for the reason pointed out by Machiavellli:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.

Any system that does not allow people to experience a new order of things by voluntary assortation is doomed to the political equivalent of theocracy: Imposing a single social theory on unwilling human experimental subjects. You must allow for consent to experimental treatment of human subjects and you must allow for control groups to evidence causality.

There is going to be a revolution.

Oh good grief. 15 years after the DotCon implosion, when industry leaders and Congress responded to the collapse in tech employment by ramping up H-1b guest worker visas, we're supposed to believe this is news?

I"m not sure I'd say TUTOR was an ok language for the day. It didn't even have local variables. Local variables were so controversial that I had to leave the University of Illinois and get a job as a system programmer with CDC to add local variables to TUTOR.

And in other news, the virus purportedly renders people unable to think rationally about epidemiology. Scientists are baffled as to why a virus would do such a thing, although they professed a mysterious urge to share bodily fluids with those around them and denounce as "sciencephobic" those who shunned their advances.

You guys should contact Peter Thiel's Breakout Laboratories that funded a just-completed study of a physical model of a tornado with the potential of generating electricity -- baseload electricity at that -- from ambient heat.

Here are the most recent photographs and short video of that scale model which, at full scale, would be called an Atmospheric Vortex Engine.

While the public facing human resources people may be clueless, the hiring process is anything but clueless. The hiring process select for candidates that are con artists. At a fundamental level this is because the people who are creating the hiring process are con artists.

If a group of people wanted to exclude homosexuals from their territory, paying the relocation costs of anyone who wanted to emigrate, how big must that group be before you would permit them to have their own way of life?

CNN Reports: "A Vectors Without Borders physician back from West Africa tests positive for Ebola at a New York hospital."

Khallow writes:

And it's worth noting here that despite whatever the American Physical Society or the US Department of Energy has said about cold fusion in 1989, research continues.

In the US it continues among professors emeritus that are dying off now at an epidemic rate.

They aren't really in the way now. I don't expect conservative, perhaps hide-bound institutions to embrace every new concept that comes along, even if in theory, that's their job.

A graduate student who attempts to so much as replicate an existing experiment is putting his entire career in jeopardy, starting with the Texas A&M fiasco where the APS took seriously allegations of fraud against such a graduate student's thesis of fraud. Those allegations were made by a "science journalist" whose main claim to fame is a diet book

There is a huge distance between embracing speculative theories and blanket rejection of experimental results.

It may well have been that no one ever actually refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But the behavior of the scientific establishment toward experimental results is clearly a pattern which, even if nothing of substance is behind cold fusion phenomena, is indictable. (Read "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed" by Charles Beaudette for multiple examples of such behavior.)

Theories are not experiments. Popperian falsification applies to experimental falsification of theory -- not theoretic falsification of experiment, which is impossible. Indeed, even experiments do not falsify other experiments except to the extent that they demonstrate a hypothesized explanation of experimental error is true. Here again the pattern of behavior by the true believers in fashionable interpretation of physical theory demonstrate time and time again they have made errors reckless that they make the errors of Fleischmann and Pons in their neutron measurements look trivial.

Where do you think, for example, the APS "embraced" experiments by Caltech et al sit on Fig. 3 of Storms's paper?

Clue: They're so far outside anything remotely intellectually honest that they fall way off to the left of the figure -- and _this_ is what your estemed authorities used to claim Fleischmann and Pons were guilty of fraud, incompetence and/or delusion.