What's so funny (strange, not ha-ha) is that half of the bottom 80% are absolutely convinced that half of the 1% are on their side, and the other half similarly. The 9% are similarly split, but don't care as much because they make good enough coin to keep them in place. The 10% already mistrust everyone else, so they'll beat the shit out of the 80% as long as they can stay fed and above the squalor of the unwashed masses.

2 issues:
1. Where would you find the money to do it if all the wealth is concentrated at the top?

Organization and startup funds and getting things going from scratch just gets harder. In corporate terms, the "barriers to entry" for a new colony are higher today than at any time in the past.

2. What would you do with the unproductive?

If this is a world for the 99%, or even the 90%, you've still got to find something for the bottom 40% to do. You can leave out all the lazy people (if you think you can), but you've still got masses of the unqualified. Otherwise your utopia is just cherry picking the workers and it's 3-4 generations away from sliding back to the 80/20 mix of dullards (and I mean that in the nicest way) that causes economic segregation to occur.

I think those are bigger issues than the governmental hurdles or lack of an untamed wasteland to conquer.

But everyone wants to pay the rates of the healthiest, safest, best maintained because if you have to pay more than that you must be getting ripped off.

Most people can't understand statistics or probabilities that extend past a single coin flip. Hedges, short and long positions, defensive financial tactics are way beyond your typical American who can barely balance a checkbook. Understanding that insurance is a combination of both - not gonna happen. The only dichotomy that people "understand" about insurance is that it is an evil expense due every month that gives them nothing in return, and a magical pixie horse that pays you money if something bad happens to you.

It's a "commitment to preserving and providing access to the truth" when they spy for [my team].
Otherwise they should be brought home and prosecuted for treason and espionage.

In this case, the reliability will probably increase. Also, the certainty of production will increase. And even if it costs $10,000 a year for a skilled assembler in China, one of these will likely replace 2-3 workers and pay back in a single year for a device which (at least for Apple's purposes) has a 2 year life cycle. 100% ROI will make any CEO drool.

Tech support is somewhat different. Only 10% of people will need it, and only 1% will need it more than once in a year. It doesn't matter how crappy it is as long as most of the issues get resolved. And if you happen to be a serial user of tech support, I'd expect the company would rather you dog the competition than use up their phone lines. Besides, for the most basic level support the only reason there is a human on the other end is because people like to interact with humans. It's just a voice prompt system leading you through a menu of troubleshooting, with the rep on the back end pressing the "continue" button for you. Beyond that, of course, people with actual training are needed but for first level...

Man, I wish I had mod points today, 'cause you're dead on. Having worked with a lot of people "outside of my class" as a consultant in a (mostly) non-technical field, there are a LOT of people out there who couldn't do the advanced jobs these semi-skilled labor machines "create." We are marching ever faster to a place where 80% of the people in the first world will be unemployable simply because it costs less to build and maintain a machine over its life than it costs to hire a worker for a single year. It will get to the point where we can retask, recycle, or recreate a machine to do many jobs in less time than it takes to re-train the average human to do the same job at even half the efficiency.

The productivity gains from the industrial and information revolutions have not resulted in shorter work weeks for all, but rather a larger unemployed population. It's hard to imagine this will end well.

China isn't like the USA.
They tend to move purposefully and quickly when goals are set.

In the run up to the Olympics, China unilaterally closed coal power plants, various heavy industries, and took cars off the road, all in a bid to reduce pollution in Beijing.
It took the USA 40 years to tell grandfathered coal plants to either shape up or shut down.
  Compare to China:

The key idea here is that all this is happening unilaterally.
Their actions probably wouldn't even be constitutional in the USA.

Your two statements do not support each other.

Because a) most US cities have ordinances prohibiting arial fireworks (and some prohibit all fireworks) without a permit/license, and b) Many states prohibit the sale of arial fireworks, or limit the size to a few grams, or less than N feet (meters) off the ground, or all of those things.

The better question would be to ask why these regulations exist, and the answer is to prevent this:

http://icelandreview.com/news/...
http://icelandreview.com/news/...

Also Iceland in mid-winter carries a much lower fire risk than much of the US in mid-summer.

I like setting off my own, but there are upsides to municipal displays as well:

* They're usually choreographed.
* They're cheaper (free).
* Less running away from lit fuses and more sitting back and enjoying.

If Snowdenâ(TM)s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 âoetransparency report,â the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last yearâ(TM)s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowdenâ(TM)s sample, the officeâ(TM)s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

900k, not 10k.

Do you think a salmon is 1,000,000 times smarter than an ant? Because that's the consequence of applying a linear timeline to exponential growth.

How smart is an ant anyway? Or a salmon? Or a dog? How do you quantify it? Are they 3 smart? Maybe 11?

But to indulge your arbitrary metrics for "smartness," we can simulate entire colonies of ants already: http://www.not-equal.eu/myrmed...

So maybe the future is closer than you think. Six or seven closer.

Let my preface this by saying that I believe all parallel construction should be illegal, and I hope/believe that it will eventually be ruled accordingly. Partial truths are still deceit, and dishonesty in the legal system opens it up to (further) abuse. It's either illegal to lie under oath, or it is not, and the government should hold itself to the same standard that we expect of citizens.

That said, parallel construction is precisely about concealing the impetus. The classic example is a traffic stop that appears to be random, but is actually targeting a vehicle. The targeted vehicle could well have been stopped solely for whatever reason police used, and so that's the "parallel construction," even though police knew exactly which vehicle they wanted to stop.

"You'd be told only, âBe at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said. http://www.reuters.com/article...

Bringing a canine unit to the storage facility would allow the officer to tell the partial truth that he got a hit on a storage unit during a walk-through, even if the impetus for bringing the dog and doing a walk-through was because of a CI (and even if the hit was prompted). The deceit isn't in saying how the contraband was actually discovered/acquired, but in what the impetus was for using that (perfectly legal) method in the first place. That part is the "parallel construction."

Now you might have been saying that GP's speculation that it was parallel construction is wrong, but we're all just speculating on what the officer might have been doing anyway. Maybe it was just a recreation for the camera and they forgot to edit that part out.

I know that the evidence supporting the existence of souls is about as compelling as the evidence for mermaids. Maybe slightly lower actually, since people have actually claimed to see mermaids.

Also, don't forget to blink. You wouldn't want your eyes to dry up!

This is very true. Though, to be fair, when a sub surfaces ("lands") it can do it nearly anywhere, and there's a larger margin of acceptable surfacing speeds (relative to it's operating limits).