Its not about the money, its about what the money can buy. You even said it yourself with your last line:

100k/year in a place like Alabama affords you a 4,000sqft home within 30 minutes from best jobs and economic centers in the state. If you live in other areas in Alabama, people can afford a good middle class living on $50k/year and even less if youre smart. Support positions that don't require physical presence are frequently moved from CA to the east coast and the cost savings is on the order of 30-50% simply because of the cost of living adjustment. That's why Wells Fargo kept so many jobs in Charlotte, NC when it absorbed Wachovia.

Your income tax analysis is dishonest and lacks understanding. The CA income tax hits 8% at $60k, which can't buy jack in CA, for most citizens its at 9.3%, double the AL income tax rate. If you make under $30,000, you pay less income tax than someone who lives in AL making that amount...but you also have to pay 1% for mandatory SDI up to ~$100k, making up the difference.

BTW, for item #1 in your list, PA has a flat income tax. Why do I know all this stuff? I do it for a living. CA, NJ, and NY are the most expensive places to operate a business and have the highest cost of living adjustments, bar none.

Solar's relatively low cost/km^2 could become a difficult problem if it starts attempting to compete with other power projects purely on cost. Most cost/kwh numbers floated around don't factor in the total cost of owning and operating a solar installation, and only show the theoretical cost/kwh based on the equipment cost vs. power production. Right now, the driving factor for solar power generation is clean energy and not cost. I'd love for it to get down in cost to be competitive within the decade, but I expect that when that happens, cost might have to be not just equal, but significantly lower, to account for the solar field size needed to replace a standard coal plant. Lack of land availability can also become a damper on adoption in more populated areas, the areas that need the power the most.

I really think that something will need to be done to facilitate distributed solar via rooftop in order for solar to take over as a main power source. Right now, its too dangerous to build a business model around solar leasing via home rooftops because the rules are changing so frequently and the rules are different everywhere you go.

One concern, do you think the significant differences in the language will cause the translation to miss the mark? I see other people enjoyed it, but I think you're in the perfect position to evaluate how the translation effects the book's delivery, given you initially read it in Chinese. Of course, this would require you to read it in English, so no worries if you don't have an English copy available.

Everyone here is whining about the taxes. The countries mentioned and those around them generally have higher taxes than the US so its usually a moot issue. The way its written is similar to the way dual state taxes work for a person who lives in one state but works in another: your taxes paid in the state you work are applied as a credit to your resident state. This means, in terms of states, if your work location has a higher state tax, then you pay nothing to your state of residence.

When we balloon this example up to the national level, this means if you are working in a country with higher taxes than the US, you won't owe US taxes. Yes, you still have to file tax returns, but its quite simple unless you have a complicated financial situation, which usually either means you're doing well and can afford the prep, or not doing well and won't owe anything anyway. Think back to when you were 25 or 30 and how simple your taxes were then. It starts to get complicated later on, and by then they'll have the money to decide if they want to keep it. As they say, mo' money, mo' problems.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the opportunities. My In-Law in Finland obtained a doctorate in a medical field and mentioned to me that he might have to move to the US for jobs in his line of work. The advantage of being able to come to the US and apply without having to go through a visa process is huge, it can cost companies tens of thousands of dollars to get a worker through the process in a reasonable timeframe and you really have to be worth the effort for an employer to do it. Dual citizenship is also something valuable to multinationals due to the cross-pond action and will allow a lot of promotion opportunities if that's where they end up. Last but not least, there are some really nifty scholarship opportunities for almost any dual citizen. My ex-girlfriend was afforded a significant scholarship to study overseas because of her dual citizenship with Hungary, and it also works in reverse.

Look at all their options, maybe even sit down with them and talk about it once you've laid them out in an unbiased manner. Currently, based on your summary and bullet point list, you're definitely looking at it with jade-colored glasses. I think you should step back and look at it through your kids eyes, trying to see if there's other things you missed that might hurt them down the road.

A lot of times, those little comments or notes are the call for help.

Mod parent up. On the discussion of safety regarding dock workers, you are correct in that they have actually gone so far that they make it less safe. The unions are so terrified of any kind of automation removing jobs that they refuse tech advancements that take the workers off the dock and put them in offices operating remotely, which takes them out of harm's way. It is very common in Europe but doesn't happen in the US.

Unions generally don't mature from their inception, its kind of a self-selective process. The goal of union leadership is more bodies, more pay, and more dues. As a result, they are inherently anti-progress, anti-tech, and anti-change. If they tried to align more with the companies they work with in setting production goals instead of man-hour quotas, I think the relationships would be much more amicable. Another poster got it right that the problem is with 'monopoly unions' or unions that control the labor force of an entire industry with no competition and sometimes no competition/advancement allowed (forced via contracts). In those situations, the most high-profile being the Teamsters, UAW, and the two coastwide Longshore unions, its about the union and the union only, industry be damned. Then people wonder why GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out, hostess crashes and burns, and several shipping terminals go bankrupt.

On another note, I feel the adversarial process is the bane of the 20th/21st centuries. It has turned prosecution/defense into a farce, it creates uncooperative industry issues like the unions/companies mentioned above, and it has turned congress into a wasted existence. Too many lawyers are bringing the adversarial process into places where it doesn't belong and ruining any chance of cooperation and advancement.

I think part of the flat icon craze is directly related to touch interfaces. Our mind, like it or not, sees 'bubbly' icons or buttons like the old XP start menu as an item where pressing on the edges is no good, like accidentally pressing the edge of a real-world rounded button and it not fully depressing. In a touch interface, this gives the illusion that the contact area is much smaller than it actually is, and makes for a hesitant approach. 'Flat' icons or targets give the impression that you can register a press on any part of the item. This is important on touch interfaces where tactile feedback is limited and your big fingers block what you're actually pressing.

This becomes quite obvious when looking at some of the old touchscreen keyboard UIs on the early touchscreen-era phones. The start of 'flat' UIs didn't come from windows 8, it came from the touchscreen phone. As someone else mentioned, DPI scaling might also be a factor, but this also came from the DPI race on touchscreen phones.

SteamBoxen are contingent on them figuring out the controller, which as I recall they've poured a lot of resources into. The draw of the SteamBox is that you can play PC games designed for PCs in the living room as well as the typical console games. Ever try to play an RTS on a TV with a controller? It is flat-out torture. That's why they are trying to work the touchpad into one of the d-pads on their controller, so you could play games like Dota 2 or Civ5 or any RTS in the living room. If they don't get that aspect of the SteamBox working, then its simply another console and has no defining draw that separates it from the others.

"Attribute not to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence."

I know it seems like something that people should easily understand and know, but our society (and in this case beaurocracy) is naturally populated by specialists/savants because of the way we approach and reward work. All some of these people see and do every day involves chasing bad guys, and some of them really can't think outside of their benefits of the change to see the damaging implications. Its kinda like multinationals naming a product that sounds like offensive slang in a foreign language without knowing. Or, a more obvious and closer-to-home example for this crowd, the manager / corporate officer that cripples IT security in response to non-IT complaints that their computers are inflexible and hindering their work.

It could very well be malice, but don't rule out incompetence.

About a decade ago, a one-shot FX series called Dirt came out. It was about the celebrity tabloid journalism industry, I thought it was pretty interesting even though I'm not into that kind of stuff. One of the more interesting parts of it was that there was a schizophrenic photographer, and they did a couple segments from his perspective during periods when he was on and off his meds. I have no idea if their portrayal is how it acutally is, but I thought it matched what we've been described to as the symptoms. When the show was through his perspective, it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't real sometimes.

Another name for these:

ton(UK) 2240lb = Long Ton
ton(US) 2000lb = Short Ton
Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb) = Metric Ton

The volume isn't anything to scoff at either. I just did some numbers to get a visual perspective of the plastic mass we're talking about, in terms of container ships. 8 million metric tons at standard container size and weight (1 TEU = one twenty-foot equivalent unit, average loaded weight of 20 metric tons) and with high-capacity containerships averaging 15,000 TEU, thats 27 fully loaded ships. Thats approximately 350 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 15 meters deep of containers stacked 14-high per ship. That's a lot of material.

'Rods from God' becomes much more feasible when you imagine space mining enterprise. In the distant future with captured asteroids in earth orbit, obtaining mass already in space and re-purposing it for orbital weaponry is mostly just a math exercise.

When most people refer to LEGOs, they aren't referencing the company directly but the blocks used to build. Like Q-Tip, LEGO has become the go-to example of building blocks to the point where people call other brands LEGOs. In that sense, the additional S is fine and it explains why so many people reference to them as such.