As you state, current subsidies of $X are clearly enough to get people to live there and do work. If the subsidies went away, then Y% of the workers (guessing close to 100%, but that's just a guess) would also go away, resulting in the prices for some goods to approach infinity -- those goods being tied to energy production, food production, and the like.

This would eventually balance by wages for some of the jobs increasing such that some of Y would return to work, increasing costs of products Z, which would then go back to the urban areas at adjusted market value A.

The end result would be that instead of things like milk and electricity being at prices low income wage earners in the city can afford, it would be set at higher values.

The result of that is that the minimum wage floor would need to be increased so that the urban support workers could afford to make a living. This means that urban products and services would increase in price.

Basically, keeping rural costs low subsidizes the few so that each person up the line who takes a cut of the profits is taking a cut of a smaller pie, keeping cost of living lower. Increase the costs of the initial resources, and you create relative scarcity and create accumulation of wealth at the top of the monetary chain.

How does this not fundamentally make sense? It even follows the laws of physics -- we don't live in a world with no friction, and if you increase the coefficient at the start, the point at which things come to a standstill via waste energy happens much sooner.

Apple Pay is basically a contactless EMV wrapper for iPhones. SoftCard complies with EMV too, but I've seen nothing indicating that Apple Pay will work with SoftCard processors. This is purely a contractual thing though; there's nothing technical to stop it from working.

What this stops is someone writing an app that uses NFC for whatever they want -- if someone wants to use Apple Pay plus NFC with their own EMV-compliant processor, they just need to talk to Apple's legal department. If someone wants to write an app that leverages Apple Pay, they can also do that.

Basically, you can't roll out something like Google Wallet for an iPhone, but you can support all sorts of NFC payment types with it.

The reason you don't think it's even close to a two way street is precisely due to the fact that the necessities of rural living are subsidized.

If they weren't, cost of living would skyrocket... and suddenly, all natural resources would be unaffordable to most people in urban areas. Energy would cost more than the average wage earner could afford, everything but the most basic foods would be for the ultra rich, infrastructure maintenance would be too costly to keep up with.

It's like trees: you get to see the trunk and the branches and leaves, but never forget the huge root system underneath that supports the tree. Without the roots, the tree WILL die.

Yeah; I was expecting to see something that could top http://zentasrobots.com/ which has been covered on Slashdot a few times, but instead saw an ad for Edison and 3D printers. I find the MorpHex significantly more cute and creepy than this thing, even with its back-lit translucent body parts.

I think they were just holding it wrong while taking the pictures.

I find the imagery in this joke rather... disturbing.

A "pure" LA degree these days tends to be a survey degree; graduates are expected to be jacks of all trades, master of none. This is great as a secondary layer of education if you're self-motivated to pursue some more focused line of work/work experience as well, but doesn't do much by itself other than show that you're a good generalist.

However, how many people with a STEM degree have mastered their field? Usually STEM jobs are all about lifelong learning in the field. LA degrees are more of a kickstart into this same arena, providing more options but less focus.

I know people with fine arts degrees who are excellent software analysts (eye for detail, patterns, etc). They also do great in the human interface design departments. Many people who go in for STEM education have a really difficult time communicating their work to others, which not only affects documentation, but also collaboration in the workplace, and it promotes the silo effect.

You really need a mix of people from both arts and sciences for a healthy workplace, no matter what field you're in.

In that case, CS stands for Communications Studies or Computers Studies, not Computer Science. CompSci is sometimes lumped in with Applied or Engineering sciences, but I'd question any school that would take what should be a course load focused on the mathematical theory and design of computational systems and place it in the Liberal Arts discipline.

That said, see my previous response to the GP :)

To take the opposing view:
I know someone who got hired to do tech writing for an embedded systems company who was finishing off a combined CS and English Lit. degree, and had already generated a Liberal Arts certificate based on the cross-discipline work they needed for that.

I also remember the intense difficulty most people in CS had with writing a critical paper on ANYTHING.

I think the end result is that it doesn't really matter which degree the person has: what's important is that they can display that they can work across disciplines, present themselves well, and learn technical detail well enough to perform with it under pressure in a short period of time.

After all: which would you rather have doing a programming job: someone who got a 2.0 average in a CS degree and spent evenings and weekends playing MMORPGs, or someone with an Eng Lit. degree with a 4.0 average who has been writing Android apps as a hobby and did their major paper on the effects of digital media on 21st century literature?

Actually, depending on the programming job and the wage/contract you want to pay out, I guess it could go either way.

A good dealer can integrate a variety of aftermarket add-ons, have alternative financing and insurance packages on-site, provide extra customer services such as roadside assistance and no-hassle inspections and initial tuneups. Not much of a reason, but it's what they give for their existence.

oblig www.dobugsneeddrugs.org

The actual article (not the IB times pileup) is linked in the comments here already.

It's also hazardous/lethal to overdose on arsenic, and yet eating apple cores isn't going to cause problems. For that matter, eating foxglove flowers will stop your heart, and yet digitalis is the go-to drug compound for people with heart issues.

For that matter, you can die from swallowing water.

Of course, this is all beside the point, as the idea here is that your blood is pumped outside your body through a screen of magnetic particles and then pumped back in without the pathogens (and without the particles). People undergoing such an invasive process in a controlled lab are unlikely to be swallowing buckyballs and having them tie their intestines in knots.

Let me Xerox off a few examples of when similar Noun/Verb phrases lost their trademark in the past.