Since when did Somalia have a Department of Education?

Watching Fox News is absolutely essential for understanding American politics. Or did you think ignoring the number one influencer (by viewer count) in news when trying to understand the thing being influenced is a good idea?

Yay for anonymous violence.

The National Weather Service has had a flood warning in effect in my region literally every day for the past two months. What thirst?

Congratulations, by your rhetoric, you have successfully demonstrated that you belong to the "correct" team. What, you want a cookie?

Self-generation is already perfectly feasible. What's missing is self-storage. When that is solved, we can have REAL energy independence. Independence from all these manipulative selfish bastards.

If I were an electrical engineer, I'd be trying to solve the problem myself, using nickel iron batteries. If I were a chemist, I'd be trying to make a gel-pack nickel iron battery.

America has one of the most highly skilled work forces in the world, both in terms of the number of skilled workers per capita and the extent of their skills.

And so what. Get a master's degree in your field, your resumé gets discarded by HR: overqualified. Have 20 years of experience in the field, your resumé gets discarded by HR: overqualified. Fail to have 10 years of experience in 5 year old technology, your resumé gets discarded by HR: underqualified. Fail to have the right school on your resume, your resumé gets discarded by HR: underqualified: Fail to claim you can walk on water and fly solely by grabbing your bootstraps and yanking, your resumé gets discarded by HR: underqualified. Goldilocks was never so picky. Why? Because they're desperate for any criteria they can use to dig themselves out from under the absolutely monstrous deluge of resumés they received for the job posting they only posted because the law required it and they've already got the H1B lined up they're going to put in that slot.

Right. Obviously. Because it's not like all of the existing markets haven't already been divvied up among the giant entrenched players who have not only rigged the laws and regulations against startups but have piled up tens of thousands of bogus patents that guarantee they can exort a ruinous sum from literally any venture if they so choose, and the only choice is over whether they kill your venture aborning or wait until it's slightly valuable, then extort payment that will only kill your venture a little bit later. Nevermind the fact that if you haven't already Gotten Yours, you can't even afford to hire a dog walker, let alone one of those literally millions of unemployed skilled potential workers, let alone the 20 it would take to get something really useful accomplished.

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Now that I've gotten the scathing sarcasm off my chest...

If we couple your assertion with the guy several hundred posts up who says he's up to his ass in one-off contract offers he can't fulfill after booking $170k in a year doing evenings-and-weekends work, we can come to a conclusion: this Brave New Tech Economy scares people and that fright is disastrously self-destructive.

Let me lay out the pieces.

Once upon a time, not too very long ago, small business was the majority type of employer in the United States. Despite gargantuan headcounts at a few multinationals, they were still outnumbered by literally millions of small businesses. But small business headcounts have been steadily shrinking, because they've been increasing automation. They had to, because there were millions of them, and they had to increase efficiency, because everybody else was and if they didn't, they couldn't compete and they'd go out of business, so they did, so everybody else had to too, so they did and here we are twenty years later and they find they've backed themselves into a corner.

They don't understand what they have. They bought a complicated tool, that they absolutely must have to stay competitive, but they don't understand it.

It's called a computer.

They don't know how it works, they don't know what makes it go, they actively dislike the damn thing if they don't outright hate it, but by and large it allows them to do things that simply aren't possible with their current headcount unless they have it so they keep using it, hoping it will keep working, and cousin Larry's sister's kid is good with computers (he gets by with cargo cult practices and duct tape) and anyway rebooting seems to work.

After twenty years of this, the cracks are showing. The duct tape is peeling off. It's getting harder and harder to keep that ancient creaky old database running because somehow the computers just stop working and every time that database (which exists on only that one hard drive sitting in that tiny office off the production floor) somehow gets copied to the new system if they're really lucky and they don't know why that sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't and oh my god the last time it didn't work the secretary (sorry, admin assistant, she was very insistent on that point) had to spend a month reentering all the paper she could find into the system and she never did find it all and boy was that big customer pissed when his order was late and we really don't want to go through that again but cousin Larry's sister's kid says he can't just keep copying it anymore because something something something argle bargle and what do we DO?!?!

Do you know somebody?

Here we have the whopping disconnect that is causing quite a lot of grief. American small business has automated a bunch of stuff, but that automation falls out of date far faster than anything else, it seems to require constant attention, and every time the nice grey-haired gentleman in the corner office has to deal with it, all he hears is argle bargle and he really wishes he could just get it fixed, but he tried that a couple of times and really since that last time cousin Larry's sister's kid worked on it, it's never been quite right, I mean he's a nice kid and all, but still the secretary (sorry, admin assistant, she was very insistent on that point) says she has to do this when she used to do that and it's not right and it won't stop doing it and argle bargle.

So, do you know somebody?

I mean I heard on the news about these contracting website things and I know what contracting means, it's what we do, but I tried that website and nothing came up but then something came up and it didn't make any sense, and I heard if you type stuff in to one of those things somebody in Outer Mongolia will steal your credit card and run up charges and my wife will yell at me when her card gets declined at the salon so that sounds like a bad idea but there's no phone number and there wasn't anything on that site about what we have anyway, it had a bunch of stuff about Agile and NOSQUIRRELS and rubies and what? I can't afford rubies. I just have this... thing... I've got the disk around here somewhere... and it needs to keep working, but the news said something about Microsoft discontinuing support and cousin Larry's sister's kid said we have to Do Something and the guy from Giant Megacorp that's buying our biggest shipment of widgets this year said it's true, we really have to or Bad Things will happen.

So, really, do you know somebody?

It would really help if you knew somebody who was also a nice grey-haired gentleman with a reassuring handshake and a good pair of sturdy workboots who drives a good ol' American pickup truck. You know. Somebody you can trust. Somebody like me. Except he's kept up with this stuff, you know I always meant to but I was always so busy, 'cause every time you turn around Giant Megacorp would come back with a different demand and say the part had to be made differently and we had to figure out how to do that without breaking the bank, and oh yeah there was that ISO 9000 crap, we had to do that, gawd what a racket, but that's done, and anyway I just haven't had the time, and now I've got two grand kids with another one on the way (have I showed you the pictures of my grand kids? Hold on, I've got 'em right here) and time just gets away from me.

Seriously, do you know somebody? ...

American small business needs Stuff Done, but American small business owners are notoriously conservative, in the classical sense, and each and every one of them has already been bitten once by a snake oil salesman (or knows somebody who has), so they're severely gunshy and have fallen back on the old reliable talent search mechanism, the personal reference.

And it's not working. It doesn't scale, it isn't communicating the need correctly (or at all), and there truly is a severe shortage of workers who meet all of their criteria. They really want somebody who displays all the correct badges of trustworthiness (a small and ever-shrinking pool), who has extensive domain knowledge in their field (small manufacturing), who actually does know what the hell he's doing (not a large pool to begin with), and who isn't a hipster (total failure in the badges of trustworthiness department) or a smooth operator who will effectively rob them and could literally destroy the company because the automation is now unavoidable and it has to work or we lose the Giant Megacorp account and we're done for.

And Joe Random Slashdot reader can't just hang up a shingle and say Open For Business! and get anywhere. Mr. Small Business won't even hear of it if he did, and if he did accidentally hear of it, it would fail all of his trustworthiness gates, especially the only one that is absolutely non-negotiable, the personal reference.

So there's a talent shortage. There's just nobody out there who understands My Problem and who can help me.

Really, there's a communication problem. Perhaps TsuruchiBrian and Tuidjy could bridge the gap.

I wish you luck.

Do you know somebody?

You really shouldn't talk about your grandfather that way.

You jest, but this is a necessary task. The C-level executives have managed to insert their heads so far up their asses they're in danger of disappearing entirely.

Except for Charter Cable. Which I was absolutely ASTONISHED to learn has dumped basically all of their contractor technicians, hired employees, instituted training regimes that insist those employees spend a mandated minimum amount of time doing fresh installations before they're ever sent on trouble-shooting calls, and, wonder of wonders, hired quality inspectors who follow after those technicians and independently and apparently rather severely criticize their work.

It seems there is one executive in the country who escaped the echo chamber. I can only assume s/he'll be fired next year for spending all that money without generating miraculous profits.

Yes well, even knowing what the words "jury nullification" mean guarantees a free pass from jury duty for life.

And people say the decline of education in this country, particularly in English, is such a bad thing...

Some high school English teacher somewhere deserves a medal for "socially promoting" the oaf who couldn't understand the words on the screen.

Giving-a-fuck has nothing to do with voting. Think Civil Rights Movement. Now consider the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which was attempting to follow that same precedent. How well did that turn out? Oh yeah, nothing.

The propaganda machine is too far advanced to successfully challenge with peaceful in-person protest any longer. The utter failure of OWS was the definitive demonstration of that fact.

You think slips of paper peacefully stuffed into a ballot box is the natural progression here?

I'm afraid not.

Let me guess. And a barcode tatooed to the back of your neck?

Back under your bridge, troll.

There's no extra energy expenditure if your electromagnets only provide motive force and levitation is provided by opposing permanent magnets. In fact there's energy savings, since there's much less friction to deal with and it's just as easy to scavenge braking energy. It is more complex, since controlling magnetic fields for motive force isn't quite as trivial as motor + axle + wheel.

In practice though, the maglev part isn't likely to happen any time soon. It complicates the hell out of material choice for both track and cars, since steel suddenly becomes an issue, and enough permanent magnets powerful enough to do the lifting job required currently costs a small fortune (it's neodymium or bust). The prototype uses wheels and I'd guess the first production installation will too. Unless it got built in Dubai, and quite frankly, I'm astonished that it's not being built in Dubai first. The first buildings on their 100% artificial island just opened...

What the other guy said, plus the fact that cities everywhere else are incredibly hidebound. If it hasn't been done before, they're categorically against it. Then you tack on lovely things like the taxi system as it exists today, which means monied interests with a long and storied history of corruption are against it, and it's dead in the water almost everywhere.

Given how many factors were against SkyTran ever getting an installation, and how exceedingly universal those factors are, I never expected to see this. I was fascinated by the concept when I first read about it and saw their dinky little demo track. It will be interesting to see if their simulations of throughput were correct. Their claims have always been a little outrageous (but not necessarily false).

If their math is correct, it can even replace those. The system is supposed to be capable of very high throughput. Higher than every other form of transit.

We finally get to see if their simulations are correct.

And the second selling point for such a system in Tel-Aviv is the throughput of the system should successfully prevent the formation of a waiting crowd, ever, completely eliminating one of the suicide bomber's favorite targets: a crowded bus stop with a bus just arriving.

It remains to be seen if the system works as well as the simulations. Getting enough of the individual cars routed the right direction at the right times of day is a fascinating software problem.

They'd better be. They need the revenue. They're about to get handed a whopping bill for licensing.