There is NO correlation between one's major, and one's social life.

Source, please? That's a hell of a claim.

There have been numerous studies showing that there are strong correlations between certain MBTI types and certain majors; I'm not saying MBTI is a proxy for "social life", but at least introversion/extroversion play into types of interaction in social life.

and basically all paper (it's just cheaper for paper).

A lot of the paper pulp is coming from tropical palm plantations; they are much quicker to yield than temperate forests. Paper pulp demand is still causing deforestation in tropical areas, just not so much in the US.

A school, I might add, that couldn't even COMPREHEND THE EXISTENCE of stagflation

What do you mean? Keynes modeled stagflation; he didn't use that term, but it's clear that Keynes, and those who studied his work, were aware of the effect of a supply shock on an economy.

The issue with Keynesian policy and stagflation is, given two problems with conflicting resolutions, how do you address both of them?

We now know that tackling them one at a time works. First you address inflation, then you address stagnation. This isn't a weakness of Keynesian theory -- it's validation.

*Mathematics* isn't science. It is more properly a branch of philosophy that happens to be really, really useful for the sciences. The difference is that sciences are empirical---ideally, scientists observe the world, form explanations of their observations, then test those explanations with further observations. Mathematics is not empirical---mathematicians start from a set of fundamental assumptions, then use logic to deduce the consequences of those assumptions.

From the summary, it seems that the criticism is that economists are behaving more like mathematicians than like scientists---that is, they are making assumptions about how the world works, then using logic to determine the consequences of those assumptions. Instead, they should be making observations, then using the tools of mathematics analyze data taken from the real world and test their explanations.

I don't know about that. A couple of back-of-the-envelope computations make me think that 10 years is not a long enough timeframe to make such a camera anywhere near common. Consider, for instance, the 3 ton weight. Suppose that technology develops such that an equivalent sensor halves in weight every year. Ten years then represents halving the weight 10 times, giving a weight of approximately 6 lbs. That definitely isn't iPhone weight, and comes from a pretty optimistic assumption about how quickly the technology will develop. The computation, for completeness: (3 tons) / 2^10) ~= 5.9 lbs

Or we could look at pixel counts. The summary claims that the camera will capture 3.2 gigapixel images. Apple claims that the iPhone 6 has a 8 mega pixel camera. So the telescope camera will capture 400 times as much data. Assuming that the iPhone camera doubles its pixel count every year, it would take almost 9 years to get to 3.2 gigapixels. Even if we assume that the iPhone is used to take panoramas, where a panorama can have up to about 2^3 the pixel count of a non-panorama (again, see Apple's claims), this represents 6 years of doubling every year, which is, again, pretty optimistic.

Long story short: yes, technology marches forward, but this is likely to be a pretty impressive instrument even 10-15 years in the future.

SF is the art of the technical class. The central message is "You can fix it or create wonders by applying intelligence and dilligence to the problem."

Huh? That is not the central message of SF. That is one single theme used in some SF, and used in the most generic sci-fi out there. The conflict is man v. nature/technology or man v. society (or even man v. self), where the virtues extolled are up to the writer. Besides intelligence and diligence, some other virtues often key in SF include self-reliance, capacity for specific emotions (love/empathy/etc), having morals, willingness to deviate from the norm, etc.

Mainstream fiction is the propaganda of control of the general population: The central message is futility

What the hell kind of mainstream fiction did YOU read that was contemporary with Bradbury? In 1953, when Fahrenheit 451 was published, the books that topped the Adult Fiction bestseller charts were: The Silver Chalice (Costain), East of Eden (Steinbeck), Desiree (Selinko), Beyond This Place (Cronin), and Lord Vanity (Shellabarger). None of these books had a message of futility OR conformity; very much the opposite.

You are saying that Bradbury imported the mainstream fiction message of "Do what the authorities tell you to do. No matrer HOW badly they're doing and HOW bad things get, don't try to improve them. Anything you try will make them worse.". Not only was that not the mainstream message of the day, you would be hard-pressed to find that as a theme in any of Bradbury's works. I ask you to please name a single work of Bradbury's where this could conceivably be the case.

I would still consider "fraud" to be an edge case.

>It's 2015. Why does transferring money in the US take more than a minute and a few cents? I transfer money via ACH all the time for $1 per transaction.

Manual wires are different, and have a lot of costs associated with them. There are people involved, not just data being pushed.

Change (1) to "Following too close for the given conditions," and both (3) and (4) are dealt with. If conditions are such that your stopping distance will be increased, you are responsible for leaving a correspondingly larger amount of space between yourself and the car in front of you. There is, perhaps, an edge case in freeway driving: someone changes lanes in front of you, then slams on their brakes, but that isn't really relevant to approaching a stop sign.

2001 called!? Did you warn them about the airplanes?

Yeah, because Slashdot never, ever covered general politics, popular culture, or economic issues prior to the Dice takeover.

Yes, but you claiming that it must be cyclical to be truly organic... well, "No true Scotsman..." seems to apply.

You are co-opting the term organic to mean something extra.

Reddit was started as an experiment in free speech.

Wait, what?

I recall Alex coming on Slashdot a lot to promote Reddit when he first launched it. "An experiment in free speech" was not anything I recall being discussed. I also remember him posting on Slashdot while still developing reddit.

What I recall, is promotion of a general interest platform that was more open than Slashdot (unlimited moderations for all!) and less susceptible to vote brigading than Digg.

It was while ago, so I may be a bit foggy on the specifics.

I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course.

First, I think that's a ridiculous assertion. Smart farmers don't diversify because the taxpayers bear the risk of their crop failure, or of crashing prices; they have insufficient incentive to diversify.

Second, if we had a true free market, dumb farmers would go out of business and we would be left with smart farmers allocating resources efficiently. Isn't that the point of economic libertarianism?

Note: I am far from libertarian.

What do you mean by cyclical? Do you mean the livestock/fertilizer/crop/fodder cycle? Do you mean crop rotation? Or something else entirely?

Just curious, since I'm not aware of either cyclical production or crop rotation being a requirement for organic farming (although both are considered best practices).