The practical result says that it works anyway.

There's nothing currently practical about it. It's in the experimental stage. If we had a spacecraft flying around on one of these, I'd be much more confident. The last time an observation violated the laws of physics like this, it turned out to be a loose cable connection.

By Noether's theorem, if we're violating the law of conservation of momentum, the laws of physics must vary from place to place in the Universe. (Unfortunately, I don't understand general relativity well enough to generalize this.) If this actually works, we're going to need a rewriting of physics comparable to Special Relativity. We definitely should push ahead with testing this thing, although I still think it's going to turn out not to be a reactionless space drive.

In the case of that that I'm familiar with, the employee got the pay of the higher position while she was in it. Seems fair.

Yes, it's that outstanding performers tend to be promoted, often to a position that requires significantly different skills, and once they reach their level of incompetence they are never promoted again, but remain where they are.

I once had a manager describe company policy to me, which was the mechanics behind the Peter Principle, being completely straight and not realizing the implications of what he said. I was glad to leave that company.

You left out the other thing that people do when they're feeling threatened: look for somewhere more stable-looking. Typically, your better people will be better at doing this, so you're getting rid of the top and bottom and lowering morale in the middle.

You can't simplify out the humans in microeconomics without making serious mistakes. They won't behave the way you want them to, or the way you think they should. Remember, some of your employees are at least as smart as you are, and they outnumber you. An attempt to outwit them is likely to end badly.

Maybe we should say you never have a non-tech directly manage people who do technical work. Then you can have non-techs immediately above the lowest-level management, and it can work. (Where I work, out of five people directly over me, including the CEO, only the CEO doesn't have good experience in software development, but this is unusual.)

Last time I had a serious disagreement over a technical issue, they put us in a conference room and we discussed it among ourselves. This was a lot better than having two people with a great knowledge of what they were doing put the decision in the hands of somebody less familiar with the situation.

When the higher-ups were looking for new managers, they told us any of us could apply, and not long ago said that they'd work with anybody who wanted to teach them how to be a good manager. (We do have very good management here, one of the reasons I like this place a lot.) I figured that I'd gotten this far (41 years from starting my first programming job) without getting into management, and I didn't see any reason to stop now. I like programming a lot. A colleague mentioned that he might be interested in heading that way, and after getting a taste of leadership responsibility told his manager he'd changed his mind.

Actually, no,. the stability matters.

Suppose I want to send you $1K, and I use Bitcoin. I buy some BTC, send them to you, and you sell them. Presumably we're using an exchange of some sort.

That means that the exchange has to worry about BTC volatility. Much of their assets are in BTC. If nothing else, the dollar value of their BTC determines how much business they can do in a given time period. The exchange is taking a big risk, and they're going to pass it on to the users in the form of large fees. If BTC were more stable, then an exchange wouldn't need to worry much, and could charge smaller transaction fees (and "could" means "will" in a competitive market).

BTC is also a bad way to send money. Each BTC transaction has a real cost in the form of computations to be made, and if I send you dollars this transaction has to be done twice. If it's a better way to send money than normal means, it means that somebody's making excessive profit off the normal means of sending money. Since the real costs of changing numbers in registers are much less than the real costs of validating the blockchain, banks can undercut BTC whenever they want.

What percent of the population has tattoos on their wrists that would interfere with the watch? I very rarely see one, but my experience is very likely not typical.

Libertarians play at least as many word games as anybody else, and try to identify themselves with popular concepts.

I'm all for the minimum government to secure liberty and freedom, just like any libertarian. It happens that my idea of what that is differs very much from the typical libertarian, but I keep seeing libertarians talking about freedom and minimal government like they own those concepts.

In this specific example, I believe that we need net neutrality enforced by the government, or people are going to lose liberty and freedom. You don't argue against that, you just assert that such regulations are against libertarianism, which is by your definition about liberty and freedom.

Why don't you try making a semi-coherent description of libertarian philosophy* that doesn't rely on unfounded assumptions about what is liberty and freedom?

(Reminds me of a time when a devout Christian friend of mine was asking some neopagans who rejected Christianity what they believed in, and got no answer that a Catholic priest would not have wholeheartedly agreed with.)

*No party big enough to matter, and which doesn't have a really firm central governance, has a wholly coherent philosophy. Individuals can have coherent political philosophies, parties of individuals can't.

Vista was released 8 years ago, and it was crap. Windows 7 was 6 years ago, and IIRC you could get XP on new netbooks through 2011, although a quick look didn't find any verification. In other words, any 8-year-old hardware probably came with XP, and XP remained the best Microsoft OS up to 6 years ago. Six years old isn't essentially dead.

You only get something if you win. It's hard to win, as most companies won't outright admit to illegal hiring behavior.

Asking when you graduated from high school is almost certainly not to establish that you have a high school diploma, but to establish your age. Most people graduate at the age of seventeen or eighteen, while the date you finished your Master's program doesn't give them anywhere near the same accuracy.

In other words, they're practicing age discrimination, without giving you enough evidence to file a complaint that has any chance of going anywhere.

Fortunately for your argument, there is no land around the South Pole, so there's just sea ice.

You're not doing well. GP referred to scientists and Republicans. Neither are necessarily government employees, and although Republicans form a semi-coherent political group scientists do not.