For a few U.S. southern slave owners, the solution was to earn enough off the slaves that they could afford to free them in their wills. Were they wrong? Would the slaves have been better off owned by someone with no intention of freeing them as the otherwise owner held up his nose and refused to participate? Would the slaves have been better off in Africa, dead of one savagery or another?

Idealism leads to conflict and eventually war and death. Productive change happens when moral pragmatists get to work.

That's about the same as a high school diploma in the U.S. K through 12 I really only encountered two teachers who both inspired me to think and rewarded me for it when I did. And I came up through school systems widely regarded as among the best in the country.

At two score and one, I look back at the kids I knew when I was a kid and realize that many of them were (and probably still are) idiots.

Today my only contact with kids is via the news. The news rarely reported on the smart kids back then too. It reported on the sycophants (spelling bee!) and the phenomenal idiots. As it still does.

So yeah, kids today are idiots. But when was that not the case? Your childhood?

I keep hoping my Verizon stock will crater. They lead the oligarchy that controls the Internet. But until it does collapse, I'll continue to cash my dividends.

There's another tautology out there:

"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference."

This is why university degrees from India are about as valuable as a high school diploma in the U.S.

You misunderstand the difference between a digital computer and an analog computer. Both are based on 1's and 0's, on and off.

The digital computer is driven by a clock strobe. When the clock strobes, the whole set of circuits accepts and processes the next inputs. As a result, the circuit is stable at the end of each clock cycle.

An analog computer has no clock. Inputs are processed as soon as they arrive. As a result, the circuit is never known to be in a stable state. It's continually in flux based on its inputs.

"Parallel processing" describes a digital computer in which multiple programs advance with each cycle of the clock. There is no clock in an analog computer. Every single circuit acts independently as soon as its inputs change. Groups of circuits can be heavily interconnected or lightly interconnected but that interconnectedness is very poorly described by digital computer concepts like "parallel processing."

If we ever build a true AI on a digital computer, it won't work anything like the human brain. The underlying hardware is just too different.

The brain is an analog computer. The notion of parallelism is fundamentally different for an analog computer... In a sense, every single neuron is operating independently and in parallel with the rest. Describing it in terms of parallel processing with digital CPUs makes no sense.

You got it exactly right. Different backgrounds yield different perspectives on any challenge that faces the team. This leads to more broadly considered solutions that have a better chance of working well.

From reading her essay, I gather that Erica's problem is that she doesn't seek diversity. Earlier in her career she sought to homogenize herself with her co-workers. Now she seeks homogeneity with "her type." Both approaches are ultimately unsuccessful.

You have to take an interest in the lives of the folks you work with. Why? Because people take an interest in the people who take an interest in them. It's human nature. But you don't do that by becoming the the other person, you do that by sitting with them and listening. Then you share your own very different adventures while they listen. Shakespeare offered it as a platitude but it's basically right: to thine own self be true.

Translation: because only very high-skill programmers attempt to use the very unpopular functional languages (like lisp and erlang) the resulting code is, on average, of better quality.

THAT mistake I can understand. They've seen SO many cases of Ebola after all. But permitting scores of people to be in the room with the guy *after* they decided to test for Ebola was a preventable error. And failing to tell the folks involved in his treatment to stay away from public transportation for a safety period following their contact with a confirmed Ebola patient was total amateur hour. Seriously, WTF do we have a no-fly list for anyway?

I don't know about Libre Office, but Firebox would behefit from a few more people telling certain devs how truly awful they've done this past year. It's bad. So bad.

Have you had much luck with that approach in a major open source software project?

Sure there is. Average car purchase or rental: X% tax. Below average: X-factor%. Above average: X+factor%. Jewelry? Always a high %. Watercraft? Never a low percent and grows in portion with the cost of the craft. Milk and staple vegetables? Always a low percent. Junk food? Always a high percent tax.

Designing a progressive consumption tax isn't even particularly hard.

Why would you presume that? Just because that's how we've done it for an income tax?

That's going in my quotes file.

Piketty's solution is crazy but to my surprise I find myself nodding at Bill Gates' comments. Consumption taxes, not labor or capital taxes.