Actually, chaning from words to pictograms speeds up the order taking process regardless of literacy level. Even an extremely literate person will be faster to recognise common pictures and symbols over words. This is why a lot of hazard warnings (chemical, flammable, corrosive, nuclear, biohazard) have a large symbol and smaller writing. The symbol lets you know it's flammable from a distance, the writing gives an educated observer some idea as to what or why.

This indicates a problem with your nation, not the hiring or order taking process.

In a lot of first world nations, applications to work in McDonalds requires a written application and in some cases, a simple written examination in the native language of the country (so a French Micky D's worker is expected to be able to read and write in French). Hell even in many third world nations like Thailand or the Phillipines literacy levels are high in fast food restaurants as you need a certificate in hospitality to work there.

Your thinking is obviously US centric. The US is the odd man out in first world nations in this regard as it tolerates a relatively high level of native language illiteracy and almost promotes a large underclass of non-native language speakers. Or in other words, education is inconsistent and there are jobs "Americans wont do".

This.

China and India, unlike Europe still had a strict caste system in place in the industrial revolution. Changes that made the lowest castes more wealthy which Europe and the US benefited from was disruptive to the rulers at the time and they resisted this. Cheap labour was unable to compete with machine produced products so Europe increased its trade volume whilst India and China had their trade reduced.

Put simply, China and India didn't keep up with the times and paid for it. This is why Mao rushed to industrialise China in the 50's and 60's and despite a lot of spectacular failures (and massive quantities of extremely poor quality home made steel), it did produce benefits for China in the end.

This is why no pure capitalist economy has ever existed and why successful are mixed economies.

Remember that the 600 KPH of this train is its top attained speed, not it's average speed. TGV trains in France often reach 320 KPH (200 MPH) but this is for short periods and the average is much lower for sections of track that only support lower speeds (120 KPH and below).

Trains are great for getting around in densely populated countries like England and France but not for long distance travel. If I had to go from London to Paris, I'd take the TVG as it would be faster (Flight time is 1:05, Eurostar is 2:20-3:00 depending on stops), if I had to go from London to Berne I'd fly as its 1:40 by plane but 8:20 by train. Even with all the mucking about at the airport, flying is faster (if it takes you 1.5 hours to leave an airport, you're doing it wrong, doubly so when travelling in the Eurozone). One of the big problems with long distance rail travel is the fact you need to change trains.

I used Steam for 5 years before spending a single dollar on steam.

How, I bought games at a store (be it online or physical).

That being said, I never participated in anything Steam offered and realistically still dont (it's just something that updates itself and every now and then refuses to work until I reboot). Also I completely understand why Valve is doing such a thing.

You are aware that Android is currently dominating the mobile market?

You're also quite wrong. Google have a huge stake in GIS and have become one of the worlds leading imagery providers, so much to the point that they now have their own satellites (GeoEYE).

Google is extremely diversified, so much so they could survive the complete destruction of their advertisement business.

The Android guy won because the Iphone guy could only use one bottle at a time.

The last thing we need are walking corpses, especially the bitey kind.

Also, Cryogenics isn't about freezing dead people and thawing them out dead to bring back to life. It's about freezing live people and thawing them out alive. If it every works (not like our fundamental understanding of what is "impossible" has ever changed in the past) there will be no corpses involved.

When the summary mentioned a frozen brain, then a head going through customs, I kind of assumed the girl was dead before the procedure occurred.

Or to be a bit more accurate, socialism and the free market are not incompatible.

You're right that most (American) people assume socialism is communism with it's state controlled economy but the reality is almost all socialist countries live with the same kind of mostly free market as we do (China and Vietnam being the most obvious examples, the Nordic states as well although their socialism is extremer mild).

Even capitalism and socialism are not incompatible. many nations have a universal health care system that sits nicely with a capitalist insurance market.

"Capitalism", "Socialism", "Free market" and "Planned economies" are all extremist philosophies in their pure forms. When mixed they are all quite effective in their own ways. Think of it this way, Drinking 95% ethanol will likely kill you, however a nice whiskey at ~50% abv is quite enjoyable, despite the active ingredient being ethanol. Western nations owe most, if not all of their success to the fact that they're not extremist philosophies.

I agree with your scepticism although I dont have an issue with someone paying themselves a low salary and having their income coming from other sources (the Google CEO's do the same thing). They invested their time and money wisely to get there.

However with this CEO, cutting his salary was only half the story, the shocking other half is that he did that to give his employees a raise.

Also remember that he draws income from other sources, investments, shares and so forth. His $1,000,000 salary was probably being taxed at a higher rate. Jeremy Clarkson earned GBP 20,000,000 last year, what the papers dont mention is that only GBP 2,000,000 came from Top Gear, the rest came from other investments he's made.

Also note that I have absolutely no issue with this what so ever.

What he just did was remove all money worries from his staff. Now all their focus can go on increasing the value of his business.

This I have some different thoughts on.

Rather than just simply raising their salary, why not tie their increase directly to the health of the company? Why not make part of their salaries a portion of the companies profit similar to the way shares pay dividends (in fact they should be almost exactly like divs). This would be better encouragement to ensure that they work towards making the company profitable as the more profitable a company is the more money they receive. Make the payouts quarterly rather than yearly though and pro-rata for employees that have been there less than 3 months.

The only major downfall at the moment is the administrative overhead involved in having two pay systems.

However I can already feel the shrill, nasal cries of "communist" at this plan... How dare we give workers have a personal stake in what they produce.

This.

People who think that autonomous cars will stop all road fatalities are deluding themselves. You're still going to have suicyclists cutting in front of traffic, pedestrians stepping out onto the road and all manner of human stupidity. In fact with the false sense of security that autonomous cars give people, non-driver deaths will get worse.

The best that will happen is that total deaths might drop 1 or 2 per 100,000 pop in the US, I doubt it will have much of an effect in the UK where the road toll is already 3 per 100,000 pop. The Nordic states are even better despite a drinking culture and lots of snow and ice.

And there are enough motoring enthusiasts out there to ensure that you never will and I am a fellow driving enthusiast, whether taking twisties in a S2000 or cruising the back roads in an old Benz, I find driving extremely enjoyable so I know how you feel.

The idea that everyone will stop driving is as ridiculous as the idea that we're all going to become hippies and start eating quinoa and kale exclusively.

Not really, Manuals dont abide lazy driving where as automatics encourage it. There will always be outliers which is what you observed, nothing we can do about.

You've seen someone doing something stupid in a manual. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone do something stupid in an auto. Phone use especially. You might see 1 manual driver doing something stupid, but for every one of them there are 200 automatic drivers being equally or more stupid.

I know this is anecdotal (but so is your evidence), but as an emergency services volunteer, most accident victims were driving autos and this is far in excess of the percentage of cars registered at automatics in Australia. Also anecdotal but the the UK which has a very high percentage of manual drivers has one of the lowest road tolls per capita of any country (the US is around 10-12 per 100,000 pop, Australia is 5-6, the UK is 2-3).

I'm a manual driver and it's not hard to change radio stations when driving a manual, but it is very hard to text or have a phone call and they're the real killers on the road these days.

I've been an emergency service volunteer here in Oz and at the majority of car accidents we find a mobile phone in the foot well (or on the roof if they're driving an SUV)... Every time they're not locked we open them we find a half finished text or a recent phone call.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that driving whilst texting becomes the primary cause of road fatalities in most countries in the very near future.

But yes, I feel everyone should be forced to learn in a manual as it forces you to form better driving habits in the most formative part of your driving life. Even you never set foot on a clutch again after getting your license, the lessons a manual teaches you will already be ingrained. Manuals simply dont abide lazy driving habits.