I agree completely.

Russia has a long heritage of eating up invaders. I think it is solid and will be stable as a state.

It has a problem with crony capitalism and it's first attempt to throw off fascism failed. But I think it will eventually gain the same corrupted kind of hybrid self government the rest of the world has. Essentially, the people will have some actual say in local, territorial, and national government while the corporations will have too much sway.

But the russian people must become intolerant of corruption. Bribery and graft are tolerable in small doses but they destroy your economy and your government when they become an accepted way of doing business.

I wish russia and the russian people success in getting over this obstacle on their path to being a modern state with relatively free people and less hostility and phobia of other countries.

And seriously- any attempt by china to take over russia would be the largest mistake they ever made.

Don't like Canada? What's wrong with it? Its's beautiful, it's rich, it's got huge... tracts of land.

Most of their products are "nice to haves" not "must haves".

Do I need a new TV when mine isn't broken? Nope.
Do I need a new computer this year instead of two or three years from now? Not really.

Meanwhile, the loss of income would be immediate and lead to social unrest which they really try hard to avoid.

Wish I could mod you up.

Informative, interesting, insightful.

And even more lens flare?

From what I recall, notch splits the 2.5 billion with 2 other people and his share is about 70%. I can't find a citation right now (grr) but pretty sure I read it back in september.

I was also happy to hear that he shared 3 million dollars with the 25 mojang employees. It is nice when a business owner that sales the business shares something with the employees who made the business a success.

From what the articles have said, part of the reason he sold was he couldn't take the stress and fan anger directed at him (as the company figure head for things he didn't personally have a hand in) made him really unhappy.

The water fountains could be done with the new particle effects.

It's a nice creative build.

When the police stop killing 7 year old black girls.
And when the police stop killing blacks at 2x the rate of whites.
And when police stop pulling over blacks at over 5x the rate they pull over whites
And when police stop pulling the white girls in mixed groups aside- calling their parents to come pick them up so there is no arrest warrant AND THEN telling the black girls in the group that "the trash goes in back"
And when judges and juries stop sentencing blacks to longer sentences than other groups for the same offenses...

Then the crap you are trying to sell will be valid.

Can blacks succeed in america? Yes.

Is it MUCH harder than it should be for them because of massive and systemic racism? Absolutely.

Whites do well given unequal schooling, unequal job opportunity, unequal law enforcement, a larger "old boy" network holding a disproportional portion of the plum positions and passing them down to their children, etc. etc.

The days of white privilege are still slowly ending and they will probably continue slowly end for at least another 40 years.

Because apple may have problems selling their devices when the public is informed of the horrific abuses (deaths, suicide, maiming, cancer) involved in their pretty products.

When opens users of iphones up to comments from others about how evil their phones are and how could they buy a phone built with such evil methods. And when they are made to think about how evil the build process is- some of them feel uncomfortable.

And because apple builds enough of the devices that it can be identified by reporters unlike many other essentially anonymous unknown products that are less famous.

I think you would agree that if a farmer is 20 miles from any other connection point that no company or municipality should be legally required to run that farmer a line and charge the same price as they do for a line in an urban neighborhood.

If we decide that we want to provide that as the federal government- cool. Tho it would be pretty damn irritating to find we are running subsidized internet out to some wealthy lady's wilderness estate because she put in 10 acres of hay.

There are alternative solutions (like satellite) but they are more expensive. And that's the trade off you get for living away from other people. You can't share services and costs. You don't pay city taxes.

Everything we decide to do is a trade off. Alaskan Fishermen who are maimed and even killed while fishing for us don't get inexpensive high speed internet either. Neither do game wardens living in remote lodges in national parks. And we don't provide any of them the same level of police, fire, and water service either.

It's not a question of saying they do or do not deserve it. It's prioritization of limited resources. Do you run high speed internet to Fred the Farmer for $20,000 or do you pave a street or buy a new fire engine or buy the new police cruiser?

Especially when changes in technology may allow Fred the farmer to have high speed internet for $120 a month in a couple years.

But if we had unlimited resources- sure. Give the farmer's high speed internet with no extra charge for the extra hardware they require.

There are restrooms and toilets on the star trek deck plans.

It's more the effect of social mores of the times (and even today-- you don't see people do stuff in the bathroom on shows like the Big Bang Theory tho they do talk about it occasionally).

If you can't trade your labor for food and people feel it's immoral to give you food, things will get very bad for a period of time.

Then, like the luddites (who saw they were screwed- requested training on the new machines and didn't get it), most of the losers will starve to death homeless and then 20 years later everyone will refer to them the way we refer to luddites today.

It's a fundamental challenge to capitalism.

In the short term- fewer jobs will mean capital requires even more hours of those who do have jobs and that means even higher unemployment.

I.e. if Comcast uses excess profits from everywhere else to provide ridiculously low priced service (aka walmart breaking into a new market until the competition goes out of business).. then Tucows can't win.

I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.

There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.

OTH, left to their own devices providers will cut "less" profitable customers over "highly profitable" customers. Which doesn't work with something that is basically a public utility.

The problem is that solar won't start off able to deal with 50 year events like utilities used to be capable of handling. I say used to be because these days they can't any more due to cost savings measures they've taken to increase profits.

For example- land lines used to stay on unless the line was cut down. After our last hurricane, the land lines went off after 6 to 24 hours when the batteries at the local substation ran dry--- these days any new lines are fiber optic (no copper- no power) and old lines are being replace.

Likewise- our electrical power used to be back up within a few days after a hurricane. I'm not sure what has changed but it was 2-3 weeks in many areas. I suspect cost cutting there too- less repair supplies kept on hand (don't want all that stuff sitting around causing inventory taxes), fewer staff retained (enough for normal times but no extra capacity), and less proactive tree cutting.

But hit solar with a 5 day storm- people die-- and a five or even seven day backup will come to be normal.

I see the mistake I was making.

Lol. It sort of made me feel better as I've been comparing my income to household income.

There is still a minor gap between our figures and then one issue with the data..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 Median income.appears about $29000.

The 80% level
$57,500 to $59,999 80.90 agrees with your figures

$100,000 or more 93.39 The top 6.4% make over 100k

--
Okay the problem.
This data which agrees with your figures includes "Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age,"

So it has about 8 years worth of millions of young people who really not representative of people working for a living but rather working for a little extra spending money. It also includes millions of retired seniors with any income besides social security. Like the retired guy who works at my kroger two days a week.

If you look at actual prime working year people, you have two major groups
Overall median wage: 39,509 This is $10,000 higher than the figure above.
College Grad median wage: $56,027.

So it seems reasonable that among the "real" working population the 80% level is closer to $70,000.