Better idea is to voluntarily test yourself on a regular (monthly?) basis. I know doctors who do this so that in the event of a lawsuit they can prove that they were not chemically impaired. If anyone questions them then they can produce a multi-year stack of clean drug tests.

Often there is very little or very illogical differences. In many places a teenager voluntarily sending a picture of themselves without clothing to someone else counts as a felony (considered child porn) whereas an adult doing the exact same thing to the exact same person for the exact same reason would not be considered a crime at all in some cases. In fact the teenager in that case may get the privilege of registering as a sex offender for the rest of eternity even if the picture was just sent to a boyfriend/girlfriend. It's absurd but it happens. The line between felony and misdemeanor is an often arbitrary and capricious one and not all felonies are particularly serious crimes.

That's an awfully broad brush you have there. I have an alcoholic who works for me. Served time in prison because of it and lost his driver's license for over a decade. He's been sober for some years now but he'll always be an alcoholic. He's a good worker, nice guy and very reliable. He just had a problem with addiction. You could easily substitute alcohol for cocaine and the situation would identical. Just because someone has/had a problem with substance abuse does not mean they cannot ever be trusted again. They have to prove they can handle the responsibility but a blanket ban against people who have had a problem in the past is needlessly harsh. You have to address it on a case by case basis.

Sadly that problem will not be confined to IT. Even if you try to change careers a felony record is going to follow you and (right or wrong) there aren't a lot of employers who are going to be willing to take a chance on an ex-con. Companies just generally do not want to take on avoidable known risks and a felony makes a job candidate into an avoidable known risk.

Your best chance is probably through personal networking but it's going to be tough. The good news is that there are companies that will work with people with troubled pasts but finding them usually takes a lot of work. If your skill set is in IT and your convictions aren't for things related to IT then I see no particular reason to switch because the same problem will exist regardless of what type of job you seek.

It's not but I can see how it might seem that way. A lot of the physics is pretty out there and not all of it can be experimentally confirmed, at least not directly. The logical underpinnings and evidence used are fairly sound but there is a LOT we don't really know. There is a lot of "if A is true then B must be true" going on but sometimes we're not actually sure A is really true. It's not faith but much of it is very theoretical. Almost everything relating to stuff like black holes should be taken with a huge grain of sodium chloride.

Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. There are plenty of measurements we are quite confident about. Others not so much. Unfortunately for the lay person it can be hard to tell the difference. Apparently sometimes it can be difficult for those in the field to tell the difference too sometimes.

A course in financial math would be helpful as well. the reasoning holds only if the grid overpays electricity according to source (gee, who would have thunk it?), otherwise the best thing would be to maximize production (i.e. set panels facing local south) and "time shift" to use as much of the self produced electricity as possible: producing hot water, setting up the laundry machine to start the cycle at 12.30 .... and remember, when the buyer (and the taxpayers!) buy the panels, all the producibility forecasts are calculated for a south facing panel: shift the orientation, and it gets cheaper to buy olimpic cyclists and set them on a dynamo.

Generally only true if you write a check which can take a few days to clear sometimes. Other methods of payment or funds transfer are considerably faster. ACH transfers take a few hours usually. Wire transfers are nearly instant.

You could reduce the tax rates to zero and it would have at most a marginal impact. The biggest driver by far is wages and benefits. The tax burden on companies is trivial by comparison. When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges if the companies are competing directly. The rate could be zero and most of the business would still move to china if the labor content is high enough. Sure it would affect a few companies right on the fence but that doesn't apply to most of them.

The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest. If labor rates in China rise substantially (and they have been) you will see the business move back across the Pacific or elsewhere. Anything the President of Congress does will be a very tiny impact by comparison.

That's because you don't live in the right place. There are LOTS of unskilled labor jobs available in parts of the world other than the US and EU. Go visit China for a while and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers. Go out to a farm and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers.

Yes a lot of jobs we currently have will disappear and others we cannot even conceive of yet will appear. It's easier to visualize the former since we know what those are. Could you have anticipated the job of Web Developer 50 years ago? Probably not - at least not without invoking science fiction. Same thing will happen 50 years from now most likely. We have a hard time guessing about things that haven't been invented yet.

I'm a certified accountant so I'm kind of giggling over you telling me "how accounting works".

I presume you are talking about Retained Earnings which is on the balance sheet. Retained Earnings != Earnings. Earnings = Profit and that comes from the Income Statement, not the balance sheet.

Investment is FAR more complicated than simply transferring items around a balance sheet and it touches the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows.

It depends on why you are investing the profits into those Treasury notes and whether you are investing in them as a profit making venture or merely as a place to park cash intended for other uses. The accounting is substantially different depending on the purpose of the investment. Furthermore the effect on earnings can be substantial in future accounting periods which I should think would be obvious.

The effect on profit depends on the return on the investment though in the immediate period the effect is either neutral or negative most likely. You're making the mistake of only considering the current accounting period. If you buy a building and capitalize the expense it has some effect on the current accounting period but the real effect on profit is depends on what you can do with that asset. It may reduce future profits or enhance them. Without more information no one can say more.

Then you are returning earnings to the shareholders rather than reinvesting them in the company or other assets. Basically a dividend is an admission by the company that the expected return from available investment opportunities is low. The company is foregoing future opportunities so the long term effect on earnings to the company is either neutral or negative.

Not correct and even if it were you aren't considering the net present value of that $100m.

Which is another way of saying they are investing in the business. Amazon is introducing products (tablets, phones, etc), investing in infrastructure (warehouses, IT) and similar. They have a long term perspective and aren't worrying about quarterly results. Perhaps this will burn them in the end but my thesis that they are investing in the business remains intact.

That isn't likely to change in the lifetime of anyone reading this. You actually even explained why below. To eliminate all need for human direct labor you would have to invent a machine that is as flexible as a human and costs less per unit. In other words a human level AI on the cheap. That simply isn't likely to happen anytime soon. (and don't give me any BS about the so called singularity or other paranoid hypothetical dystopian futures) Any scenario where we get human level AI in a robot body for less money than a human would cost is simply science fiction for the foreseeable future.

That is exactly why your hypothesis is wrong. The return on investment is simply too long for many projects to make certain types of automation economically feasible without the invention of robots with human level AI at absurdly cheap prices. To make automation practical you have to have large enough volume of product (measured in dollars) to achieve an economic return within the lifetime of the project. There are countless manufacturing projects where the lifetime and/or dollar value of the project is too short to justify complete automation and this will not change any time soon. The labor content of manufactured goods will minimize to a limit function but the need for human labor will not go to zero without invoking science fiction level advances in technology. If you need a model to look at check out agriculture. A lot of automation has gone into agribusiness but the equipment is VERY expensive (and not getting cheaper) and has not come even close to replacing the need for human labor and won't anytime soon either.

The notion that robots will replace all human workers in manufacturing is a paranoid delusion from people who aren't actually involved in manufacturing. I run a manufacturing company. I deal with this daily.

That's pretty much the same statement as saying nothing interesting or innovative has happened in IT in the last 40 years. Just because someone did a crude version of something 40 years ago doesn't mean there has been no advancement or innovation in the mean time.

Because they are reinvesting in the business and experimenting with new businesses. Unless you have a very short term Wall Street-esqe investment horizon that isn't really a big deal. Amazon could be substantially profitable tomorrow if they chose to be.

Automation does not and never did reduce the cost of direct labor to zero, nor does it reduce the cost of any product to the cost of raw materials even in a state of the art factory. First off there is always a substantial amount of direct labor in any company, even a highly automated one and the amount is non-trivial. Second there is the important matter of overhead (Sales, Engineering, Marketing, R&D, capital equipment, utilities, rent, property, maintenance, management, etc) which you seem to be completely overlooking. Automation can minimize labor costs but it cannot eliminate them because it is not economical to automate all jobs even when it is technologically possible to do so.

Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer and a certified cost accountant. I do this sort of stuff for a living.

That's a very stupid question. Amazon has something around 110,000 employees. Amazon had revenues over the last twelve months of roughly $75 Billion. For 110,000 employees to spend $75,000,000,000 at Amazon they would have to spend $681,818 PER EMPLOYEE which I'm pretty sure is more than most Amazon employees make by more than just a wee bit. Any amount Amazon employees could possibly spend at Amazon would be a rounding error.

Righhhht. Everything is Obama's fault. [/eyeroll] Never mind the fact that the US has among the highest per-capita incomes in the world. If you want more labor-intensive (as opposed to capital-intensive) manufacturing and other jobs to come to the US the ONLY way that will happen is to reduce wages to be more competitive with the rest of the world. It has NOTHING to do with anything the Obama administration or Congress is doing and in fact there is NOTHING the President or Congress could do to change it. Simple economics 101 explains everything. High wages = high labor costs = increased automation.

If you want high wages you are necessarily going to make automation more attractive economically. You CANNOT have one without the other.

Check out the Ram 1500 Ecodiesel. 400ft/lbs of torque and gets almost 30mpg highway. Interior and suspension are nicer than the Ford too. Also GM is introducing a Colorado diesel in 2015 that might be worth a look.