The lackluster jobs reports have almost nothing to do with automation and worker replacement. Big companies don't hire in the mass needed to move the unemployment stats much more than a few tenths of percent. This is because they already have hired people. They've been hiring people for years as the grow. At some point you can decide to get a little more out of the people you hire by pushing them a bit, or maybe making their jobs a little more productive. But either way, the last thing a modern business wants to do is hire a bunch of people they'll have to layoff down the road.

Small business is where the growth in employment happens. Small business expansion is at an all-time low, and has been since the rise of stupid laws like Sarbanes/Oxley, that can devastate a small company while just adding to the accounting burden of big companies (who can absorb it or pass it along to their customers). Until the US becomes small-business friendly again, there's not going to be much job growth.

And what about all that automation? The whole point is that robots are getting cheap. That means it's going to be possible for small businesses and entrepreneurs are going to be able to buy them. What will they do with them? How about custom manufacturing everything? If you've ever remodeled a kitchen, you know that there's a lot of activity around building cabinets, designing the space, picking materials, etc. It's one of those things that produces a lot of activity and is expensive, but not so far out of reach that average people can't afford it. Now think about the automotive aftermarket, custom motorcycles, even additions to homes. All of these things are somewhat custom today. Imagine if those same ideas were applied to cell phones, where a designer could build a model of a phone just for you, have the circuit board made, 3Dprint the case in any color(s) you want, Assemble the phone in the back room and finally, gets you a detailed breakdown of the cost, which is surprisingly not much more than today's iPhone 5S.

Oh, and when you drop it, can easily fit a new glass cover on it because he knew you were going to do that.

And with cheap and smart automation (IE robots):

We'll have people who "paint" murals and frescos on the walls of your living room for the same price as a single color.
We'll have people who create furniture that no one else on Earth has ever made before, just for you.
We'll have automobiles with custom bodies, paint and mechanicals.
We'll have cell phones and tablets that fit our hands exactly and are completely unique to our needs and desires.
We'll have people who take up woodworking by designing 3D models of birdhouses and emailing the plans off to a factory, with the results delivered 24 hours later.

Actually, about 50%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#Wechsler_Intelligence_Scales

1st "unique" challenge: Design a helicopter that can carry at least one person up to the top of a mountain
2nd "unique" challenge: Build a helicopter (in a large factory using specialized parts and machine tools)
3rd "unique" challenge: Acquire helicopter (by pulling enough money into one place in order to make the purchase)
4th "unique" challenge: Learn to fly helicopter (hundreds of hours spent in classroom and practice)

And then some musclehead climbs up using only muscle power and you think that's more impressive?

Or... perhaps the stores weren't generating enough foot traffic to justify keeping them open. Retail is a dog eat dog world and not running a tight ship will get you eliminated fairly quickly.

Hopefully this will get the creator some much needed exposure and land him a new job in the graphics department.

I ran tablets for a few years, generally wanting to not lug aournd a notebook. After having a tablet stolen, I’m back on full blown PCs again. I missed having windowed apps, real keyboards and media players that didn’t suck (I’m looking at you, Comcast, blocking HDMI playback on your lousy player).

Granted it’s not as portable as I’d like, and I still use a tablet for reading books and remote controls on my home theater, but when I want to do much of anything else I prefer the PC.

And Apple has done a good job at really integrating everything so that it all works together. For example, it’s drop dead simple to share audio/video via Airplay, as opposed to the almost non-functional DLNA mess that only works when the stars are aligned just right. If you run Safari all your crentials follow you around on the built into all products keyring. Yes, there are plenty of add-ons for other platforms (most of which likely predate Apples’ keyring), but it happens out of the box and by default with Apple products.

Insurance for nuclear power plants is set up by the government, but it is funded by the plant operators:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html

It is true there's a top limit per incident, but that's true of any insurance policy.

"Can't handle?" What does that mean?

You do realize that 90% of what you hear about Fukushima in the news is BS, right? You realize that the source of your information is heavily funded (through advertising) by the same people who will directly benefit (via increased use of natural gas for electricity production) in reduced nuclear power use?

The media isn't exactly smart, but they know not to piss off the money people.

Oil companies are also natural gas companies. They love renewables because next to every wind farm is a gas turbine generating station, which is used during the 70% of the time the wind isn't blowing enough to produce electricity.

That 15 year timeline is 100% political. There's no engineering reason for a nuclear power plant to take 15 years to construct.

And that 4GW of intermittent power that you're adding incrementally has to be backed up by natural gas turbine generation.

'merica has almost as much thorium as India, so no need.

So does Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gimp+mask
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dildo&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Adildo

This doesn’t make sense. If the brain spent more time dwelling on the negative, why do people gamble? It seems to me that’s the exact opposite: the brain focuses on past good fortune (I put money in this machine and got a little more back), not the bad (I put money in this machine and nothing happened). Clearly the bad result will happen far more often than the good result, yet many otherwise average people waste millions of dolars and hours of their lives in front of slot machines.