I'm comfortable with the notion that Apple users should bear extra scrutiny.

Safety first, I say.

I hate hearing described this supposed "10,000 hour Malcom Gladwell rule". There's no such thing. Gladwell has long been trying to explain that the 10,000 hour rule was not a recipe for success, only a requirement for mastery. The fact is that mastery is no guarantee of success.

And lately, Gladwell has been giving a much greater emphasis to the notion of love for what you're doing being a more direct quality of those who are successful. And it's more than really just "love". There's an element of intent and desire and yes, love. What made Michael Jordan shoot free throws for hours and hours after it had gotten dark when he was 12 years old? And continue to do so when he was 27 and already a world champion? Why did Charlie Parker disappear for three years and practice 13 hours every day after he had been so badly embarrassed on the bandstand for not knowing how to play in more than one key? Part of it was his desire to "show those guys" after his earlier failure. And part of Michael Jordan's incentive was his famous (or infamous) almost pathological competitiveness. But those things are never enough. Because spite and desire can only take you so far, and they both have negative effects. They'll eventually eat you up (as may have been the case in Bird's example, because clearly his drug use and self-destructiveness would seem to indicate that something was eating him up). But to put the time in requires love. Doing something because it's something you can't imagine not doing. Because that's how you see yourself - that's who you are. The possible financial rewards are not nearly certain enough for that to be the sole motivation. I will bet that Michael saw himself as a basketball player and Bird as a jazz man well before they were on their way to success.

There's no guarantee for success, but there are recipes and the ingredients are often kind of specific. The good news, is that if you really love doing something, it improves the chances the recipe will be successful. Kind of like garlic and butter. There's no guarantee that a dish will be delicious, but if you start with garlic and butter, the odds improve, you know?

I know all about biodiesel, Ive made my own in the past. its not viable no matter how much I wanted it to be and I wasted a ton of money trying to make it so. I still love the concept, but it still isnt a replacement

To use dino-diesel, I go to a filling station, pull up to the pump, authorize payment with my credit card, pump, and drive off again.

To use biodiesel, I go to a [different] filling station, pull up to the pump, authorize payment with my credit card, pump, and drive off again.

It seems pretty damn viable to me!

Its going to be decades before all the gas cars are off the roads, poor people cant afford new cars so they buy used, there isnt much of a used electric market out there right now.

Poor people are always screwed regardless. Helping poor people is therefore not a valid excuse for fucking up the planet more by delaying the spread of alternative fuels.

(Oh, by the way: my alternative fuel vehicle is 16 years old and would cost about $3,000 to buy today. It runs on something called BIODIESEL. Alleged unaffordability of alternative fuel vehicles isn't even a real thing anyway!)

But even more significant was the fact that they understood that civilization was riding on their backs, and so they were doing a job that must be done lest nuclear and renewable power companies take their profits.

FTFY.

Of course where it gets really interesting is if one of the projects pursuing various forms of hydrocarbon synthesis pays off.

Well shit, when you consider hydrocarbon synthesis (from CO2 or something, I assume) then sure, that solves the problem! If course, it's also irrelevant to the "peak oil" issue since you're not talking about non-renewable fossil fuels anymore. Saying that the "peak oil" is pushed into the future because of synthetic hydrocarbons is like saying it's pushed into the future because of nuclear -- it's evidence that somebody is smart enough to use a superior alternative, not evidence that continued drilling is somehow less harmful.

Maybe we should take your suggestion to its logical conclusion and simply stop drilling for oil entirely. Then "peak oil" will never even happen! Surely you'd agree that that's the best plan of all, since it's your idea.

Makes me wonder... not which side is right, but how they have together gained such a strangle hold on American politics without ever accomplishing much (or not much anymore, anyway).

It's an inherent flaw of our first-past-the-post election system, but gerrymandering, restrictive ballot access laws, and lax campaign finance rules helped.

In a place as corrupt as the US, you shouldn't trust anyone or anything.

For the purposes of this discussion, they represent a democracy

If your baseline of a democracy is North Korea, the discussion you're having is imaginary.

Or, you are the supreme leader of North Korea.

The entire goddamn point of science is that you prove the theory using experiment, publish a paper explaining what you did and how you did it, and then anybody else [who is competent] can go read the paper and reproduce similar results for themselves.

The real issue here is the part I put in square brackets as an aside: "anybody [who is competent]." It's true that if you're not competent then you need to trust something. But what you need to trust is not the individual scientists themselves, but rather that competent people will, as a group, follow the process and weed out the disproven theories.

Clearly, to defend against a weapons-grade laser you need a weapons-grade mirror!

Really, this notion of "commercially reasonable" scares me the most. I'm guessing you could cover a lot of very very bad behavior by companies if the regulatory standard is "commercially reasonable".

Remember, this is the FCC head and former cable executive who was appointed by someone who people on the Right call a "Marxist". Tom Wheeler should be shown the door immediately. In fact, he never should have been allowed anywhere near a regulatory agency. Whenever tells me they want people in government who have real-world business experience, I think how that's the last thing we want. Government and regulatory agencies should under no circumstances be run like a business world and experience as a business executive is the last thing we should look for in political leaders. It's like hiring a bank teller based on his experience as a former embezzler. Which reminds me, this is every bit as big a scandal as the recent story of the banking regulators who had the cozy relationship with Goldman Sachs.

If you don't know about the recent Goldman Sachs story, you really ought to take a look:

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6...

Meet Carmen Segarra, whose 46 hours of damning audio tape make her sort of the Edward Snowden of the financial world. And she's every bit as heroic as Snowden. I'm sure the lawbreaking at Goldman could be said to have been "commercially reasonable" too.

Living in an oligarchy sucks balls. Godspeed to any future whistleblowers who decide to make the personal sacrifice to give us these glimpses into the lives of our not-so-benevolent overlords.

I actually received one of those as a Christmas present back in 1966!

I had one of those, too. Right around the same year. I seem to recall blowing it up with M-80s because it wouldn't help me with my homework. I mean, what good is a computer if it can't help you with your homework? I did like the first three experiments in the booklet that came with the Digicomp and then thought, "I wonder how this thing would blow up?" And by the way, it didn't blow up nearly as well as my Revell model of a 1966 Pontiac Tempest.

I did better with Estes model rockets and small creatures. We had a space race to win, after all, and I wanted to do my small part. I never did learn to code. Soon after, I learned how to masturbate and that turned out to be more engaging than the Digicomp and that was that.

If your baseline is North Korea...

I'm curious. Why would anyone use the baseline of North Korea? Are they in any way representative? They are probably the nation in the world least like other nations in the world.

I'm not exactly certain of the point you were trying to make, but suggesting that North Korea should be some sort of representative for the state of the developed world is a little bit loony.

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to use other countries that are similar to the US as a metric to measure how well we're doing, as you say, "democracy-wise"?

We could start by looking at voter turnouts in other developed nations. Yeah, we're in negative territory there. How about income equality? Well... not so good there. How about social mobility? Education? Health of the population? Mental health of the population? Violent crime? Incarceration levels?

Maybe you're right. Maybe comparing ourselves to North Korea is the only way we can look good, because we sure as hell don't look so good compared to the other developed nations of the world.

So what the Senate does is protect the minority.

Yes. They protect the minority all right. We refer to them as "the 1%". And they'e doing a bang up job, too, representing that minority.