Yeah, we're already defeated, considering our government is shut down.

Come at us, Ivan. Bring your best vodka and two shot glasses.

Romney's great weakness was really the perception that he was going to rubberstamp an increasingly radical GOP agenda. McCain and Romney were the two candidates that served across this period of GOP radicalization, (which began with Nixon, accelerated with Reagan, but went into overdrive while Clinton was President, and Bush was kind of just barely mainstream enough... and still justified an amazingly illegal and partisan agenda. McCain and Romney were the last gasp of the old party trying to ressurect some modicum of dignity and normalcy (though they sabotaged McCain with Palin).

Trump ran against 16 other GOP candidates. The Republican party has gone completely off the rails.

Romney might have made a good president, because he is a moderate. But the congressional backdrop was very alarming. People were right to throw these ridiculous points at him to paint him as a radical.

It can absolutely be alienating. I'm not even 140. But the socialization process can really be difficult, even for the "slightly above average". Most of us might be able to understand and learn about calculus and quantum physics - but when it comes to interpreting and dealing with our own emotional responses to social situations, it can be difficult to understand what our own bodies are doing. It is not a rational process. Even if you understand some biology. We're all taught (quite wrongly) that our human brain is this great rational logical thinking machine - and that's not so. Not at all. Logic and rationality are tools that the human brain has, that other animals do not. But it's the recent evolution, and we still carry the biological baggage of lower primates, mammals, reptiles, and so on and so forth. And when our bodies process a social situation in a way that is not rational, the rational part of our brain often deals with it in a strange manner; you can think of it as an "impedance mismatch".

It's not that high IQ people CAN'T learn to be personable. (and it's not necessary to either betray your own principles, nor "be fake") - It's that by the time a high IQ person is exposed to this knowledge (in their developmental path) - they likely have already accumulated a lot of emotional baggage. It is very easy to "become" maladjusted, or even "disordered" (like "personality disorder") - or at the very least: neurotic). This stuff is difficult to overcome. And I think that high IQ people probably have the cards stacked against them, BECAUSE they tend to focus on the rational-thinking part of their brain. It's their strength. They know it. And the ego is fed by this; as sort of a short-term reward. Every intellectual victory is a shot of dopamine. And our educational system does NOT reward the non-intellectual stuff: it is the social environment that's slapped on top of our formal educational system, that rewards that. So the people who are either below or average, get their emotional rewards from developing this social competence. They don't get the boost from intellectual development. And this is where these two sets diverge.

(However: I've known, in my life, a few "normies" who are actually highly intelligent. They don't KNOW they are. They don't have their personality invested in that self-image. They perform well socially. They perform well academically. And even athletically. These are those class-president, straight-a students, star athlete, and participates in activities like drama and science club, with distinction. I knew these people, and they were NOT intellectual. But they were not "normal intelligence" people, either. And they didn't have this social deficit problem that my high IQ friends had. I'm not sure how to explain that. - but maybe they avoided this emotional maladjustment somehow - maybe it was in their upbringing. Or maybe they just won the genetic lottery or something.)

Unfortunately.

You are totally correct.

Developing web-apps NOW compared to say, 1999 - is a completely different, and far more pleasant experience, and this is almost wholly because of MDN and Google's contributions to the open standards.

Microsoft has made huge strides here, because they were dragged kicking and screaming; BY THE COURTS (and were honestly only let-off, on a political changing of administrations, the case was dropped AFTER they were found guilty - in the PENALTY phase).

The list of things you had to keep in your brain, back then, was about 10% "how to do cool stuff" and 90% "stuff you can't do, because Microsoft says, and because everybody uses IE". Now the list of things you need to keep in your brain is about 20% "how to get awesome and cool features to work nominally or at least fail gracefully on all browsers, because not everyone does everything exactly the same way", and 80% "how to get awesome and cool features to just plain work anywhere"

That's seriously life doing front-end web now, and we unfortunately do not have a free-market to thank for that.

I assume that Google, at some point, may need to be reigned in - on the browser side. But I don't know how or why because they aren't as blatantly violating antitrust law like Microsoft was. (and was found to be violating it IN COURT).

If google had succeeded with Google+ and was dominating like FB; and using that for platform lock-in, I think it would be a different story though.

You're correct.

And since they got their tax cut - (and Trump's co-operation in Judicial nominees), he serves the GOP agenda well enough.

I also expect the newsmedia to blandly fall in-line behind Trump in the next year or so, and while there will be vigorous dissent among voters, that dissent will be largely invisible, to the extent it can be made so, via mass-media, and social media manipulation. Dissenters who go outside of these systems to be heard, are probably going to be dealt with, in the way they're dealt with in "other countries". You know exactly what I mean. Yeah we're fucked. It's not like we weren't warned.

This UFO/Aliens trope seems to be making the rounds now. I'm not sure why - it's been pretty much out of style for about 10-15 years. I think there was a little expectation that Trump getting elected president, that he was going to open any secret files on UFO's and hand them over to Alex Jones for immediate release to the public. For sure. Right? But that didn't happen. Now this stuff. It was kind of shocking to me to hear this story being repeated on NPR last week, but I guess that's the shitty world we're living in now.

13 year old me would have loved this stuff though.

It's not really about rents though.

It's about employers refusing to pay workers enough to pay the rents. Period.

I recently turned down a job at a university - their offer came in at $25,000 less than what I am currently making. Maybe a marijuana field near their HR dept caught fire and a smoke cloud drifted over? Can't think of any other explanation, but I'm wanting to save for retirement. Not sell my house and move into a trailer.

If rents or housing prices go up - income has to go up. Or your workers are leaving.

Well you're not wrong, and I wish I could find it - but there was a regulatory change in the mid 1970's regarding entertainment content and toy sales, and Star Wars was specifically designed to be the very first franchise to take advantage of this.

The concept was further weaponized in childrens' television shows shortly after Star Wars. Prior to this, in the USA kids could not buy toys that were associated with kids shows - because those shows would be considered advertisements.

We could get toys for ADULT shows in the 1970's, (shows slotted for evening hours, like "Six Million Dollar Man", etc) - we could get toys NOT associated with television shows (ie. "Barbie", etc). We could also get toys for FOREIGN produced shows on the non-mainstream (UHF) channels, stuff like "Space 1999" or "Speed Racer" (that was our Anime). But not AMERICAN shows like Scooby Doo, or The Monkees, or etc. (There were exceptions - like model kits and stuff like this - I'm talking about how these items were mass-marketed at the time).

It was right after this regulatory change went into effect, that Star Wars was allowed to market toys in commercials during kids TV shows, and then, a whole slew of new merchandising-related shows appeared on TV. What we now lovingly refer to as "our culture". I think the early shows were, Transformers, and He Man, and stuff like that.

Star Wars was really the first big-budget SciFi Adventure movie to use this model, due to the regulatory change.

If we are concerned that AI will be used to mistreat actual living human people; then maybe Government should pass laws dictating the proper treatment for actual living human people. Rather than try to make these abstract definitions about the metaphysical properties of toasters and how they must be manufactured to behave.

The fact is - we've already wrestled with this problem. Our most primitive AI; the landmine. Kills or maims people. Rather at random. We tried to ban them worldwide. That effort failed spectacularly. There are apparently higher priorities in government than making sure random farmboys don't get limbs blown off when working land that was mined in a conflict 20 years before he was born. Dumb landmines. Dumber policymakers.

Recently a former co-worker told me about how his employer had migrated to cloud-based email, and federated login (and some other services). It was true that their IT infrastructure was horribly outdated, and in serious need of a complete overhaul, in order to continue meeting contractual requirements with customers.

But the way this migration was performed, was a complete failure. Over 6 months, they met NONE of their goals. Software license costs ended up being more than double what was estimated. During the migration, the login servers were compromised by a new exploit. There were several complete re-installs, and on every re-install, they found the system was infected or compromised again within minutes. They went through two "big-bang" replacements, where all systems were shut down over an extended weekend, and physical servers were replaced with the spares. As operations were halted, this costs them a huge amount of money. And the extra hours of IT and vendor service were costly. (law enforcement was also involved, and, my former co-worker tells me, there will be a lawsuit by the employees whose personal information was exfiltrated). The only real gain here, was the IT staff got good experience at disaster recovery practice.

In the end, the company's yearly numbers were completely blown. They lost customers, their reputation was damaged. They ended up cutting staff. (some of us already had a feeling that things were heading in a bad direction years ago, and left).

I really really wish that I could name names here. Not just the company but the vendors. This migration plan was announced ahead of time, and so many people drank the marketing cool aid - people who should have known better. But privately, the criticisms were flying, and exactly everything that sound reasonably thinking people said would happen, did happen.

I could go further - to the beginning of the whole "Cloud Services" craze. We've all had our doubts, and pointed out the obvious flaws. And even where a service like Amazon's QuickStart setups can supposedly configure everything to be fully secure and compliant. . . this service is deceptively over-simplified, and there are so many details that are left unspoken. Moving your IT out of your own data center to the cloud may look cheaper on paper, but shipping it to some one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter cloud service is not the answer. You're still going to need a shit ton of very skilled expertise to architect and configure it, and then you're still at risk. Because your data is not in your building under your physical control. Which is really your last line of defense when shit gets real. If you need to, you can unplug.

Vint Cerf sits on the National Science Board - pretty much for free. That's a vital service he provides to our nation, and he's done it for 30+ years.

What if they were exposed to a pathogen; and they (Russians?) also blasted their target with audio, in order to confuse them and dissuade investigators from taking blood samples, doing dna tests, and looking for some kind of weaponized bacteria or virus or something like that?

Straight up you're not wrong, bra.

And I logged in with my 4 digit uid just to reinforce this point.

Suppose US was at war with Russia and Russia hired Hannity to push its propaganda

um. . .