Why shouldn't he?

Do you believe that the population is becoming more genuinely educated?

No, that's looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

The issue is that not everyone has the aptitude for college-level academics. That's just a fact, and it doesn't change just because you lower admission standards or degree standards or throw more money at it.

Price controls never have negative effects.

In that case, why not $20/hr? $50/hr? Since it has no negative effect.

Yeah, those Presbyterians are really on a rampage, aren't they?

I don't fly anymore, because I don't enjoy voluntary root canals, but ...

I went through an automated car wash recently, and instead of pushing a few buttons and swiping my card, I got to listen to a video of a cheerful smiling woman in a car (with her adorable "daughter" beside her!) explaining each step in painful marketese ... every time I did anything, she started over, talking (obliquely, tediously) about the new step I was on ... by the time I could actually drive into the car wash I was ready to rip out the screen and beat myself over the head with it.

If you are going to automate, then at least make it quick and efficient. If you want the human touch, use actual humans. (Well, just not that actual human, please.)

Figure out what level of energy use, as a whole, is acceptable by your calculations. Then figure out how much that means you get to use. Make sure to include all forms of energy usage, such as heating and energy used in building and delivering goods. Adjust your energy use to meet that level, and see how that goes. Then we can talk. Otherwise, kindly STFU.

The reason I say this is not because I'm against trying to reduce energy consumption, I think conservation is always a good idea when practical, but because I'm sick and tired of hypocritical online eco-whiners. They'll bitch about how "people" should do something yet are unwilling to do it themselves. Somehow they see it as ok to bitch that others should be willing to make sacrifices but don't make any themselves.

So put up or shut up. Don't whine that "people" need to change their energy use, but then continue to live an energy intensive first world lifestyle. You are people too. If you cannot or will not adjust your usage, why would you assume anyone else would be willing?

You can look up how much an H1b visa holder makes. The system isn't set up to look for a specific person, but with a small amount of intiution and some reasonable assumptions you can usually figure out which of your colleagues has which title in the system. If you find actual cases of fraud, report it. Let your H1B visa colleages know how much they should be making, and encourage them to demand that they be paid that wage. If companies actually had to pay those wages this whole business would stop pretty quick.

You can put it more simply and say that defensive technology had outpaced offensive technology. Fixed fortifications had reached their peak and offensive weapons hadn't quite caught up yet. All the new offensive weapons seen for the first time during that war, such as the military aircraft, the invention of tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, etc were driven by this.

I've been to North Korea and it has communist practices which remain, but they have a lot of capitalism too. The elites sort of let the black market do its thing, because they needed the black market to get the cool toys and luxuries they wanted to have. The black market got stronger and stronger and now they are so organized that many of the black market sellers wear the same uniform. The government provides housing and a whole lot of other things, but they provide a salary too. They keep having to crack the door to capitalism more and more because the black market is becoming such a critical part of society there.

On a related note, a lot of the weird things North Korea says can be attributed to poor translation. There is an old joke of foreign languages in subtitles where a foreigner will ramble on and on and on, then the subtitles will pop up with a very simple idea. The Korean language is actually somewhat like that, using an unnecessary amount of words and leaving nothing as "subject to context" or "readily understood". Their spoken language says absolutely everything. A good translator will cut out all the cruft and get to the main point, but being so isolated from the rest of the world, maybe North Korean translators aren't as good as they ought to be.

Why unthinkable? Why should free video be so very different from free TV?

I have no problem in a vehicle at all, at least not when I'm driving. After all, I'm sitting basically still and upright, and my visual processing is running the show.

It's when I'm bending, twisting, picking up objects, etc. that I get vertigo.

Why stick with Comcast then? Why continue to give them your business if they just stab you behind your back? Their VOIP offerings are hilariously overpriced. Get an OBIHai or Cisco SIP gateway, sign up for any of the dozens of SIP providers, and roll your own. My SIP provider even has voice menus you can set up on their system.

I think a more accurate description of the Bitcoin community would be "highly greedy" or "has a poor understanding of economics". I don't think technical has anything to do with it. In fact if you've some technical knowledge, some understanding of the size of the financial system, and then knowledge about the bitcoin protocol you quickly come to the realization that it has a deal breaker problem (it has several in fact) and that is that it can't scale to be the amazin' world wide currency the faithful want it to be, it can't handle the transaction load that things like the Visa network does, because of the nature of the protocol.

So all the technically savvy people I know do not involve themselves in bitcoin.

Basically I see a few types of people who are in to bitcoin:

1) Hedge fund traders/scammers/etc. Basically people out to make a quick buck. They don't believe in Bitcoin other than they believe they can make money on it due to the volatility, complete counterparty risk, etc. It is just a market to be exploited and left.

2) Self described "Crypto-anarchists" aka "greedy wannabe libertarians" who think that bitcoin will free them from the tyranny of having to pay taxes for such unnecessary things like roads, clean water, and such. They like it because they think it'll lead to a world where they get to keep their money and be free of laws.

3) Doomsdayers/gold-bugs who have a poor understanding of the concept of money (namely that it is a theoretical construct and always has been, regardless of what item is used to represent it) and think that the world and economy are doomed, but if you have the right magic currency, you'll be ok. Because bitcoin has something "backing it" that makes it worth something no matter what and thus it is great.

4) People using it for money laundering, like the Silk Road. They use it because they figure it is harder to trace than dollars/euros/etc and so use it for payment for illegal items.

You pay taxes in US Dollars in the US. You need to convert anything to that. Like if you sold a bunch of goods to someone in Europe and got paid in euros. No problem, and you can keep some of that in Euros if you like, but you need to sell some of those Euros to a bank (or other entity) and get dollars to pay the IRS. They only take dollars.

This sort of argument shows a lack of business common sense. People need operating systems to run on their computers. That operating system needs to be continuously updated with security fixes. It is also nice to get new features every now and then. What Microsoft really needs to do is drop the Major Revision concept and just sell "Windows" or "Office" as a service. The OS gets updated periodically and people pay periodically.

Microsoft has pushed this before and the backlash was/has been huge because they failed to show the advantages were greater than the disadvantages. They need to go to this model though because they seem unable to handle the task of creating a new Major Revision anymore.