Books, knowledge stored out side our brains, the passing of this knowledge and people specializing for specific tasks.

Monkeys aren't much dumber than humans, they have similar hardware. What humans have over them is the ability to learn more and communicate. We write down thought processes and then overlay them on to the next generation who then modify and hopefully improve them, thereby allowing the same idea to be chewed over and improved for centuries. Each person is programed and runs the program, and the program has been being improved and added to for millennium.

Since Humans are social creatures you can't view landing on the moon as an individual accomplishment, but as the actions of a new type of entity to the world: a creature made up of smaller creatures. Who's memory is the pages of books and blueprints, and thinks through others.

Social complexity is the newest form of evolution for the mind. If you look at human societies it can be argued that innovations in social complexity and organizational efficiency drive innovation.

The "flower power" children's heroes were drug addicts who advocated neo-marxist policies that were devoid of reason, You don't often get a better recipe for failure. Still, for the most part what he said is true. Look at the 50's: institutional racism, sexual discrimination, J. Edgar Hoover, McCarthy, the ICC and CAB and other heavy handed regulatory bodies. I think things are getting better, hell once Obama calls off the DEA raids Pot will basically be legal in CA.

The author purposely set herself up to fail so she could prove her point, she used flawed criteria, she used very flawed methodology, and very flawed examples. What do you hope to accomplish by using that as your ideological base? All you will get is flawed results, GIGO.

Life sucking is a relative term based on individual perception, it isn't Uncle Sam's job to give people what they think they deserve. Wages are based on much more than capitalists exploiting workers. They involve such things as productive output, human capitol and S&D. Paying people more for work that isn't productive at that price will result in many problems. Fixing wages is about as smart as fixing the price of bread or gas. I don't get your anger, the general facts are pretty clear. You are advocating a position that is about as accurate as alchemy.

It's painfully obvious you have never done any research on labor markets aside from reading biased books pushing an agenda. America needs facts, not flawed partisan objectives. Please stop trying to hurt this country.

Do you know how biased you sound to other, more objective people when you act like being more cosmopolitan gives you some intrinsic value over others? Why don't you just come out and say "more civilized," or "more white," since you're making value judgments based on bias over reason anyways.

2007 is the interface the Devil uses. It seem I have to work some evil black magic just to get double space, and I'm certain I sold my soul trying to figure out how to paste unformatted plain text.

I will not work with 2007. Thats not some obstinate statement, it's quite literal, I will not work. It's like trying to run 240v electronics on 120v.

The thing that pisses me of mostly is they replaced the words with symbols. I know the word for "double space," I don't know what the symbol is! It's not like formating goes to some ancient part of the human brain where the symbolism for bullets is ingrained like it is for eat and sex.

Nickled and Dimed my ass. Have you read that book? or just post links to it? I have, and it's the saddest pile of crap ever. That book should be subtitled: On (Purposely) Failing to Get By in America. I honestly don't know what her and the others who push for the living wage expect to accomplish by basing their results on flawed methods, groupthink, and emotional rhetoric. The evidence is pretty straight forward, fixing wages above market values only results in a surplus of workers, AKA Unemployment. They are trying to hurt the people they want to help. That is insane subjective thinking over objective fact. Problems happen when the governments tries to ensure people get what they think they deserve, just look at what happened when the government started giving people houses they think they deserved.

Exactly, Live, because thats what you would do, sans flat-screen and car. But you would still live, as many hard working immigrants do today, Sharing rooms and taking mass transit. I'm fine with State welfare to keep people from starving and dying on the street. It is not good to use their power to give people what they think they deserve.

For about a year I worked 7PM to 7AM Monday through Saturday, for $8.00 an hour stacking boxes. thats 60 hours a week and $500. I lived fine, hell I could have had kids, but I saved it for college. I'm with you on the living wage bit, it's just your a fucking idiot with an inflated sense of "give me," a living wage in this country is $5 an hour tops. And you know what? it makes me hate the UAW even more because I realize what over indulged asshole they are, assembly line isn't Hard work, it's low stress mindless repetition that a trained monkey or immigrant can do. Hard work is having to deal with massive stress, deadlines, and a constantly changing environment that requires specialty knowledge. Work of the mind is hundred of times more valuable, and thousands of times harder.

I'm really glad we didn't have a "living wage" law that would have kept me from being hired and give me the opportunity to go on to college.

Of course our economy is service based, assholes like you acting in the interests of the "Working Man" have driven the industry away. Thanks for your help, now could you please stop?

You did actually read the post right? Uh how about that they can keep overhead down much lower then everyone else while still having a comfortable life? Seems to me they would be better able to compete with low cost workers overseas.

What disadvantages would they have? Thrift stores aren't that bad, what does not having a TV have to do with education? Home school kids are usually smarter anyways than the homogenized product our pris..school system puts out

The hardest thing for me when I started working for $300 a week in CA was that I didn't have things anymore. It hurt a lot at first, but then I learned you can buy the well made used bluejeans at thrift stores. If you learn to cook well you can do a lot with barley and carrots. Bicycles are great exercise, and socializing and community are better then having a playstation. The only burden I ever see is the burden of entitlement. The irrational search for value in goods that has become a destructive religion. Looking for happiness on store shelves not in other people. Failure and hardship are subjective. Most people in this country view not owning a pool they swim in twice a year as some form of failure and driving an economy car as hardship.

I don't think thats it exactly. The people may buy the papers off the rack because of the lion killed hunter headline, but it's not what gets them to subscribe. That's one of the problems, quick fix sales that feed the stocks but kills the goose. People like community info and conversational currency in the long run.

You might not care about bake sales and other community things but mothers and fathers do. I don't get what your saying in point 2 though. Newscorps took out all the fluff that "nobody cares about", but are declining because they cut out the fluff? That even though the papers were profitable when they ran 95% about berries the cutting out of the berries section isn't what made them unprofitable? You seem to be disproving your own points.

My folks canceled their local and got a subscription to the LA times because the local cut out the stuff they liked about concerts in the parks and fund raising dinners, as did many other people.

Sounds like you don't either, since your whole business model boils down to stealing their "outdated" work.

So you basically take the copyrighted work of others, add some marginal utility and then sell it for a profit, And then call the very people you are dependent on ignorant. Why? for not sending you a DMCA take down notice?

You strike to the very core of the ignorance of the whole web "bubble" and the other bubbles. Your profits aren't based entirely on innovation, you have not greatly increased the efficiency of the market. You have found a more efficient means of selling the work of others and pocketing the profits from their labor. How long do you think your business model will last? Either the papers will go under or they will figure out how to get their cut from you, either way you'd be hard hit. Sounds to me the only reason you make money is time based, because it's new. A high school kid can do what you do these days.

As a side, I have to say that I work for a very small Local paper, and they are doing just fine with ads and no classifieds. There has been a serious shift in their focus from the "paper" to the web, and it is foreseeable that they will drop the dead tree route in the future. I also work freelance for a web based business journal that is doing great.

My main concern is with working and the market, not how it's distributed. I see nothing but growth as newspapers become news agencies and figure out an efficient way to get their cut funneling news stories to bloggers. I think the future will be in local news co-ops that can cheaply funnel local news to the web and people's homes.

Maybe you should put an add on Craigslist for some stringers to get your input or experiment with co-op profit sharing. It's not really that difficult and then you would actually be benefiting society and generating content instead of leaching off of others.

Locals aren't going to go bust. They are still solvent, and will always be because the websites that will replace their print editions are the ones run by the paper. I live in a City of 300k and an Alexa comparison shows the local papers website getting more page views than /. and to a very area specific populace.

I'd like one of these guys to define what "Print" journalism is. I work in a news room and I'm not exactly sure. Does it mean the dead tree outlet? or the AP style news story? because in our room we consider stories on our website "print." The people who think they are going to be replaced by bloggers on a soap box and news agregators are probably the same people who thought it was worth investing billions into Pets.com.

I liked the graph he used in his article: start at the spike after 9-11 and show how it declined.

So what he's saying is that the news companies are switching over from selling their car thats made out of paper to a car thats made out of electrons, but that it's of serious import that the paper cars are declining?

So this is like how Zombie's see then?

Everything you have said is wrong, I don't mean to be rude, but you scare me.

Not every American benefits, in fact, no American benefits.

The consumer who used to buy the pants now has to pay significantly higher prices, forcing them to spend their time patching clothing, and more of their labor hours just to buy clothing. Plus their food prices have gone up since the cotton has to be grown in this country so it now must compete for growing land with food.

The farmer is losing out because, while food may seem to be a necessity, Americans might be willing to cut back, and cotton pants aren't essentials. So the seemingly higher prices would probably not cover the slump in demand for his crops. And the cost of doing business has sky rocketed since he no longer has access to imported machinery.

The owner of the business is now deprived of his higher profit stream which helped feed the economy through stock holders and investments.

The workers are now worse off because you have now forced labor intensive industry onto the economy, without increasing efficiency or anything else, it means their wages may rise but the cost of everything else will rise faster because people who used to use tools to do things that require skill and mechanization for export are now being forced to use their hands to make pants for the domestic market. So that someone who would have gone to college is now stuck toiling in your workers paradise. Sure a lot of it can be mechanized, but at an even greater cost, meaning a loss.

And lastly you have just curtailed the livelihood of millions of foreigners who had the jobs before. I'm sure in your mind they are slaves being exploited, but the facts on free trade say otherwise.

And overnight you have a failed state like Zimbabwe

you are flying in the face of so many basic economic concepts right now it hurts: broken window falacy, substitution, comparative advantage, Free trade, pareto efficiency.

At $1.6B for 20 metric tones per contract thats about $36,287 per pound. So it's actually a good deal if you take the worst cost estimate of the Shuttle running $40,000 a pound. And that the company only does the bare minimum. for the twelve launches for the Falcon 9 at $1.6B that comes out to $133M.