Where do you get that we have more processing power with an add in than a mammalian brain the number I get is that the human brain is estimated at 100 million MIPS for a 1500 cc brain running at something like 100W - however you slice it (MIPS/cc or MIPS/W) I don't see how a $50 card gets anywhere near the performance of a 1.5 cc mammalian brain estimated at 100000 MIPS

These dangerous fantasies people have about stopping multiple home invaders with their glock or fighing off a government takeover are insane - what is wrong with these people and their delusions? - rarely is any home invason stopped by a firearm, you would think you would read about this in the local paper once in a while - and as for the government takeover, the last thing I would want if I was an insurgent is a firearm, I am a physicist, I could cause more mayhem by going shopping for the right stuff at home depot than I every could with an AK47, having an assault weapon would just out me as an insurgent

Actually this kind of atttitude discourages innovation - think of it, you have an idea which might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to your employer yet they pay you 100K/year - should you dislose it and get your $400 dollar filing bonus while some fuck in the executive suite congratualates himself for hiring you and collects a bonus - besides I know this is hard to understand in the US but we are not owned by our employers, if you want the benefits of innovative ideas you have to give the people who innovate a cut of the action, if you don't do that you might as well just admit that we have indentured servitude in this country.

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I hate top down as much as anyone but your argument is word salad with no meaning - lots of things work great from the top down, almost every successful military is run from the top down, almost all corporations are run from the top down in fact just about everything except scientific consensus, and democratic goverment is top down and most every democracy elects a top down leader for a limited term - sure maybe you as a consumer get to choose what brand of toilet paper you buy and you can claim that is bottom up, but you have no say in the production, manufaturing and distribution of said TP, that is controlled by multiple top down run corporations.

Prison is unemployment insurance and healthcare for the poor in the US - of course it costs 40K/yr to put someone in prison but only 10k to keep them on welfare....

Actually all money is debt issued by the federal government, so all money is created by the goverment period. In fact you can think of taxes as a big money incinerator every year and the goverment just creates money to pay for what it wants to do every year - the debt/deficit is just the difference between the incinerated money and the money created out of thin air. To talk of "publicly funded with private funds" is the biggest piece of horseshit I have read in a long time, it assumes money comes from businesses or "wealth creators" (how Bill Gates can "create" money is a mystery to me, he has to get it from someone else) or some other bullshit - currency is created by the goverment, it _is_ debt, and the goverment can create it at will and decide to pay people to do whatever the goverment decides needs to be done. The reality is money is just a way of keeping score, what is real is what people _do_, if a guy in a goverment lab invents the transistor or a guy in bell labs makes a transistor it does not matter, what matters is we now know how to make a transistor - the fact is the goverment has used some of its money to invest in long term research, which has helped the econmony, businesses who always have to worry about revenue and costs generally do not invest in long term research, the gov't can because it doen't have to worry about getting the money back, all it really has to worry about is the amount of money in circulation.

Hey don't forget the socialist backwards mess of a country called Germany, with their health care, strong unions, social saftey net and state directed industrial policy - they are so backwards they can't make anything for themselves, and they are bankrupt! oh wait....

What we are seeing in silicon valley is that it has become a mature industry under capitalism, while regulated capitalism can do well for incubating new industries developed out of a pre-existing scientific base (usually funded by the goverment), once the products have matured most companies under capitalism focus on "securing the revenue stream" - not innovation or other activities which promote societal wealth - these activities involve locking others out and basically finding ways through marketing, branding and using their quasi-monoploy like status fasciliated by economies of scale - like driving down the cost of labor and shaking down suppliers. These activities of a mature industry under captialism while increasing individual wealth for the owners, perversely limit or decrease the wealth of society by driving down wages and dsicouraging innovation. Most countries recognise this at some lever through anti-trust laws, but the US doesn't really enforce them any more and in my opinion much more should be done to discourage predatory behavior, such as aboloshing or severely reworking patent law and taxing the shit out of genuinely unprodcutive activites like marketing and much of finance.

Yeah - the market will sort it out! Sure some people will die of rat poison but then everyone will know Nutritious food is rat poison! Of course then I could relabel the rat poison bacon bits... As some point we could get people to eat rat poison labelled "rat poison" because nobody will really know what the fuck is in the can!

I think another point in its favor is we have so much infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine that is nice that we can create fuel for these things with energy and air - no doubt such fuel will be expensive but at least it is another source

How about Meth?

I agree these guys can just go and they can take their fucking money with them - but they can't unless they want to liquidate all their productive assets in the US which would cause the price of those assets to drop which would not neccesarily be a bad thing - real wealth comes from human knowledge and physical infrastructure, these people own the infrastructure and the _think_ they own the people who know how to do shit, what they would realize when they leave is the US physical infrastructure isn't going anywhere and that the people who know how to do shit are not going with them. Honestly, a lot of these guys are just human parasites who say whatever they think they need to say to get ahead, I see these guys every day where I work - they destroy and dismantle physical and human infrastructure to pay themselves at every opprotunity and nobody misses them when they leave.

Read Ian Bank's Culture novels - the entire society is run by superintelligent machines and everyone can live a life of liesure if they choose - in any event what is the point of improving productivity if you don't get to use some of that extra productivity to do what you want when you want? Right now after 30 years of increasing productivity we got basically zip for it except for an extremely rich ruling class.

I reference Ehrman in relation to the consistency of various biblical documenst over time, which was the topic the post I was replying to was refering to - I was not refering to his opinion about a historical Jesus, in fact I referenced the historical stories floating around the middle east and the fact that there are no Roman records of Jesus as collaborating evidence _along_ with bibilical inconsistency which point to Jesus not being a historical figure.