Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.

See, you used two words in that sentence. One of them is economy, the other is currency. They're related, but they're not the same. The thing that matters to most US residents is the economy -- specifically that it will be growing enough that it's possible to find a job in it which will secure a certain amount of output to secure one's well-being. (Residents saving for retirement benefit from both). The thing that matters to someone who borrow or lend or hold dollars isn't the economy per se, it's the fact that he can use that dollar in the future to buy a predictable amount of goods and services: price stability. (Stability is better than an increase in value of those dollars, because borrowing and lending need to balance each other out... besides, if you really wanted returns you'd find a real investment, not cash.)

The US has flirted with price stability issues in the past (look at the 1970s and early 1980s), but not to the extent that Russia is experiencing right now. Russia has issued additional rubles through the state-backed Rosneft bond offering (a bailout averting a bankruptcy for one of Putin's top cronies) which was the proximate cause of the ruble free-fall, and because of sanctions, falling oil prices, and general economic decline outside of the oil sector, the ability of a ruble to purchase valuable goods and services (like oil) in the future is in question. China, meanwhile, has its own set of currency controls (hence a thriving black market in RMB-USD) and central-bank interventions of a scope and magnitude which make QE and QE2 look small.

So what else are you going to use? Euros? No way, I thought you were worried about stagnation and deficits and stuff. Gold? Oh, yeah, obviously it's been an absolute MODEL of price stability lately, hahahahahahahahahaha... Bitcoin? Makes gold look good. Pounds sterling? Mmmaybe, in a pinch. Then most of the other currencies are on the small side, so it's harder to use them in high volumes.

You're 53 years old, posting as AC, and feel the need to announce that you're a transsexual and dare anyone to have a problem with you? FWIW, I don't think it's the world that has a problem with you--it seems like you have a problem with the world.

MS had an after-tax income of over 21 billion dollars in 2013. No idea where you're coming up with a $32B loss. Ballmer was a horrible CEO, but the biggest problem was that MS continued to make money--LOTS of money--while he was destroying the company's value, which made him look absolutely great on paper.

The article mentions several times that it can be used to track cars, trucks, and boats. Obviously we have data from lots of interstate monitoring stations, as well as devices to measure the amount of traffic passing specific points, but I'm not so sure we have such detailed data across such a wide swath of territory (multiple states) that could actually track object movements (rather than, say, just a count of vehicles passing a point). Maybe someone who knows better can chime in.

Weird article. On the one hand, it presents the blimps as the "last gasp" of a white elephant, defense contract gone-wrong project. On the other hand it plays up fears about privacy that are probably a bit overblown (the blimps don't have cameras, and even if they are installed, the range drops from a 340 mile radius to "dozens" of miles).

Hopefully they will let transportation analysts have a look at it? Could be really helpful in infrastructure planning.

I guessed that before even opening the article. He has a habit of writing misleading Washington Post pieces about government waste. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of government waste, but blame does not fall squarely on NASA. I complained about a piece he wrote last year:

To which he responded:

Nice enough, but to me this shows that he very well knew the full story but chose to present it in a purposefully misleading way. Given that there is so much real waste, I don't understand the need to latch on to myths like this.

That actually answers something I was wondering about the other day. My company was looking at a facility in Houston and it's in a brand new industrial park that is literally across the street from some of multi-million dollar homes I was amazed that the homeowners didn't manage to kill the project, and now I understand why they couldn't.

FWIW, I think zoning is like any other form of government intervention: a necessary evil. Some is absolutely required, a little more is ok, and it's only when those in power have an axe to grind, or engage in mission creep that the problems start. I'd honestly hate to live somewhere without at least rudimentary zoning, lest someone come along and build a sewage treatment next door, or put in heavy industry across the street from your $5M house like the example above.

Perhaps there's something to the pervasive media narrative about Silicon Valley after all. Not only do they have no ability to relate to the non-asian and non-white crowd but they also have no ability to relate to whites that aren't rich enough for east coast boarding schools either.

Wait, boarding schools? I don't think that's Silicon Valley you're talking about, my friend. I could see Wall Street being accused of that, maybe...

The taxi drivers feel like they own the customers. Not the whole customer, mind you (that'd be slavery). Just a little piece.

"Canadian jobs"? Do Canadians own those jobs? Perhaps this should be better-codified, then! I mean, there are places in the world where people own jobs and are legally entitled to sell the job or pass it on to their children. Mexico teachers' unions come to mind. Of course, they're also a textbook case of dysfunction and an entitlement mentality trying to dignify itself with the trappings of leftism.

Anyway. Essentially what I'd like to get at is that this is a hideously ugly form of nationalism which doesn't really deserve any of the dignity of the idealized socialist struggle (CS workers as the proletariat, ha!) and miserable economic policy to boot. (no nation in history has ever become prosperous by isolating itself from trade.)

Of course, the real question is why the US needs to launder these workers through Canada and doesn't just let them in directly (we're clearly letting in plenty of unskilled workers, after all...)

I just hope we never discover that Newton was a pedophile because then we'd be in big trouble.

Kind of. But if you want network connectivity for an Arduino, the cost starts to add up very fast. In contrast, you can get a Pi with a built-in ethernet port, or stick in a cheap WiFi dongle.

They recently released the A+, which is $20. You can get USB Wifi dongles for under $10, add $5 for an SD card, so for about $35 you've got a dev board with WiFi. Compare that to the Arduino ethernet shield, which by itself is over $45. The WiFi shield is even more.

The only thing comparable I can think of is the Electric Imp - I've been playing with one over the past few weeks. It's $25 for the unit, which includes built-in WiFi, and $12 for a breakout board. They provide an online IDE that is very easy to use. However, the whole platform is web-hosted, which makes me pretty uncomfortable.

I wouldn't put too much stock in an analysis that confuses kW with kWh (it's probably just a typo, but these things matter). FWIW I live in a state with the fourth highest average electricity costs in the country, so I'm very sensitive to electricity costs. But it's not fair to compare a year's usage at idle vs a year's usage at full load.

If they wanted to make this realistic, they should have estimated the average time one of these public hotspots is used, and then compared that additional cost to the average home usage of the private hotspot (while noting that at some points the usage may overlap, and so the electricity cost may be shared between the two).

Comcast gave me their Technicolor POS modem that came with a public hotspot. It was a terrible router in general, so I took it back and got an older model that has been far more reliable, plays nice with my own router, and doesn't have a public hotspot (or WiFi at all).