And if the only problem remaining to you in life is boredom?

Get it going fast enough and it would look somewhat like a gamma ray burst, to those directly ahead of it, and be invisible from most directions. But there's probably not enough energy in a star to get it up to that sort of speed, at least with any sort of "stellar engine" anyone has yet imagined.

Every job I've had for at least 10 years is in competition with people in low cost of living areas. Even so, I remain employed, and well paid. There's value in working local, and there's value in being good at what you do, so there's some premium to be had vs the cheapest place available.

Meanwhile, home prices in Bangalore are higher than rural America now - I would expect other factors of cost of living to follow.

You can certainly compete in a global market, if you're talented. If, however, you're doing some mindless job that anyone who can fog a mirror can do equally well, from any place in the world, then there's just no valid moral reason for the job to stay here. Further, it's only a matter of time before no one, will have that job. Technology means automation, and automation is why technology improves everyone's standard of living. The future is bleak for unskilled labor, worldwide, but that's not an outsourcing issue.

That's exactly it. You grow the pie enormously, as China, India, and Brazil rise to "developed economy" standards of living (this has arguably already happened for S Korea). More than doubling the number of consumers is a massive gain for all of us, but most of all for all the people joining us at our standard of living!
 

The economy is not a zero-sum game. This is not a race to the bottom. As low cost-of-living places get more and more jobs, their standard of living rises and costs go up accordingly.

If your job doesn't require an in-person presence, then you're competing on a global market. Best get used to that fact - it's not going away, and isolationism spells certain death for modern economies.

And don't overlook the key fact that more people buy a given product than work to make it. If lower pay means lower costs, net advantage is had to the economy: that's been studied for e.g. Walmart selling lots of stuff made in China. The total amount saved by all Americans in buying these products is several times larger than the total lost wages. For business-to-business products, maybe it doesn't work that way, I don't know, but I wouldn't just assume it's bad for the economy.

Rest assured, this is an idea that has occurred to silo/missile designers. I used to work with a guy who was an officer for a nuke base in his prior career. He didn't go into detail, of course, but he mentioned a couple of times that silo nukes were a step beyond merely "tamper resistant", and that messing with one would not be a good life strategy - even normal maintenance made him nervous.

This language right here that you're reading? Not Latin. It's perfectly fine to use the English plural of English words, whatever language they're borrowed from (it's not like English has many words that weren't taken from another language). To do otherwise come across as pretentious pseudo-intellectualism, except perhaps in a formal context. Plus, most people end up embarrassing themselves with something like "octopi" when they try.

Not so much. The whole point of the cloud is to remove yourself from long-term IT salary commitments, really, and to be able to just write a check for dependable IT quality (which apparently Azure isn't selling this year). Companies that see their IT staff as reliable and inexpensive wonder what all this "cloud" nonsense is about, while companies who just write ever-larger checks to EDS et al and shit still breaks all the time in the data center see the cloud as a wonderful escape.

If I were in Academia, I'd be looking for the slightest excuse to cite this paper at every opportunity!

No, the problem is that the congress has passed clear laws on the issue of immigration, but Obama doesn't like them. So he makes his own law through creative (lack of) enforcement.

âoeThere are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, to ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.â - Candidate Obama

""the biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. That is what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States of America." - Candidate Obama

Why are you hitting yourself France? Why do you keep hitting yourself?

It's a widely accepted corollary to Godwin's law that the person who compares his opponent to Hitler or the Nazis has thereby lost the argument, as he clearly has run out of rational objections and moved on to argumentum ad Nazium.

Nah, Tom's been this way from the beginning.

Open declaration? Surely you have a link to the speech about "just for spite"? You're not just making that up, right?

Even so, the congress has that power under the Constitution. The Congress is in charge of America, per the Constitution. The President, as leader of the executive has the job of executing the laws created by Congress, you know, the legislative branch, the lawmakers.

It's his job to "get done" those laws that the Congress passes. Simply choosing not to enforce those laws because he doesn't like them is rather the opposite of his job. As the leader of the Democratic party, OTOH, he had a different path for many years to "get stuff done", a constitutional one! The American voters deliberately took that power away in the recent election, if you believe that democracy is important.

If there's no strong consensus as to the best way to improve the country, better to do nothing that try something that "seemed good at the time". But in any case inaction is better than ignoring the Constitution.

Has there ever, ever been an unconstitutional tyrant who seized control for the betterment of the governed? I can think of a couple of cases where someone seized power militarily, then went on to create a constitution and parliament, rare as that is, but "El Presidente for Life"? Not so much.

I'm sure you'll have no regrets if a hyper-religious-conservative ends up with tyrannical control? Because you really think the problem is democracy, rather than getting your way, right?

Method matters. Obama's actions are appaling and well on the way to destroying the country for reason that have nothing to do with immigration. Immigration is a distraction at this point.

It's the constitutional issues that matter - it's been 800 years of wars to establish in Western culture that parliaments, not kings, are ultimately in charge. Ignoring the will of Congress and just making proclamations is a serious structural problem. Now we'll see if congress will do anything about this, or simply give up their position as a co-equal branch of government.

The House has the power to stop anything the government does, but they would have to actually take a stand for once. I'm not holding my breath for that: the idea that a majority of congresscritters would actually care more about governing than fundraising --- well, it's hard to take seriously.