People who complain about H-1B visas usually have a misguided view of what the real options are in this debate. They see an option where companies don't use H-1Bs and simply hire more US citizens instead. The reality, however, is that the real options for companies are:

1. Bring in H-1B visas so corporate IT teams stay in the US
2. Build corporate IT teams in other countries

Option #2 is essentially outsourcing, and it is not just some boogeyman intended to scare US workers. It really happens. Entire industries have already moved overseas in the past century, and the software developer and other engineering industries are not immune to it.

If US citizens cannot compete with foreign labor that live in the US, with a similar cost of living as US citizens, we have no hope of competing with foreign labor abroad with a much lower cost of living. There has been a push back against outsourcing software development jobs in the past decade, but if we start practicing protectionism the trend can easily start moving in the other direction again.

Most of the stuff you highlight can be handled by a feature phone, though, except reading books. I use my 6-year-old Android, doesn't seem to crash or need to reboot unless the battery is on empty (and shocking the battery still works pretty well after 6 years - will go 12+ hours between charges). You don't need anything fancy - what you want is something stable.

I'm really struggling with what to get next - the screen on my phone has been cracked for a couple of years now, so I should probably replace it one of these days. But now it's all these damn giant phones that don't fit in my pockets, don't have replaceable batteries - what ever happened to cell phones getting smaller?

If you have that problem often enough to care, you need better friends, not a better phone!

Inflation was cooked up to explain most of that after the fact, though, so it's unsurprising that it does. The fundamental problem with inflation is that too much is tunable. Penrose's cyclic cosmology explains all the same stuff, and at least has the decency to make some bizarre (and very likely false) predictions outside of the early universe.

Theories of the very early universe that require new fields that there's a way to detect today are interesting. Certainly there are ideas to explain dark energy as an extension of inflation that fit that bill. But theories that propose a bunch of cool new physics that all conveniently vanished early on are a bit sketchy, at least until we can somehow make an equivalent of WMAP for the neutrino background radiation, and observe the very early universe directly. I hope I live to see that!

That doesn't help in the least. It doesn't matter how you travel: two events, separated in space, that happen "at the same time" in my frame of reference don't do so in another. If I depart A and arrive at B "instantly" in some reference frame, then I have travelled backwards in time from another. There's no getting around that: we live in a relativistic universe.

You seem to think the QM guys cooked up this really weird story while particularly high one night, then went looking for a way to make it fit the universe. It's the observations themselves that bring the weirdness. Sure, the universe at these scales far from human experience doesn't fit with our intuitions, but that shouldn't surprise, as our intuitions are based entirely on human experience. Sure the math is intricate, far from simple or elegant, but there's no actual reason to believe the universe is simple and elegant, other than it would be nice if it were so.

Is this all some complex expression of some simpler, underlying truth that we just haven't found yet? Certainly everyone working in the field hopes so! But the horrible, crufty Standard Model just keeps making accurate predictions, and all the clever ideas of physicists to create a simpler underlying model that could explain everything we measure keep failing to do so.

but they still don't seriously threaten our society

exactly because we have vaccines, you fucking moron

and if not enough vaccinate, the diseases find vectors to proliferate again, AND they have a chance to get lucky and develop new strains that can get around our exisitng vaccines, threatening everyone period

everyone has to get vaccinated. if not, the person is ignorant, irresponsible and dangerous to all of our health. if you don't agree with that statement, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about and/ or you are blindly selfishly irresponsible

you have no freedom to choose something that threatens other people's lives (nevermind your own)

It seems like you're missing a key concept here: "simultaneous" depends on reference frame. If two events separated in space, A and B, happen at the same time in my reference frame, there's a reference frame in which A happens before B, and a reference frame in which B happens before A. There's no one true order of events.

This causes no paradoxes in relativity, precisely because you can't send information, or cause an action, faster than the speed of light. The propagation delay between A and B ensures cause precedes effect in every reference frame, and the order of events can't quite shift enough to overcome that propagation delay.

But moving FTL breaks all that. If I move "instantly" in my reference frame, then there's a frame in which I move back in time, and a frame in which I jump forward in time. I don't move back in time in my own reference frame, sure, but I really do in another. And if you're moving quickly relative to me, I can use that to relay a message from you to your past self - either by a series of accelerations between the frames, or by using a friend in your reference frame who can teleport as well.

If I want to visit my own past self, I would need to teleport some significant distance, accelerate up to relativistic speed, again teleport a significant distance, then accelerate again to match location and speed with my former self - elaborate, but possible. Or, if I could travel a great distance, say 1 billion light years, "instantly", then I don't need much acceleration at all, just the difference in velocity the Earth achieves in 6 months as it makes half an orbit would do it.

i see it as the genius of biochemical warfare by plants

our livers have been in an evolutionary arms race with plants for hundreds of millions of years. they make a substance that kills, maims, disorients, or deters us. one up plants. our livers do their best to mop it up. one up animals. rinse repeat

perversely, we've developed a taste for some of those substances. like cayenne pepper or horseradish, as a paradoxically enjoyable taste. or heroin or cocaine, as a disorienting drug

in a way, the plant still wins when we get addicted to them, like these bees. drug use is just slow motion suicide. it might not kill us immediately, but it brings us back for more, and more and more, to finish the job

See what I'm on about?

Not all puddings are puddings, but we still call them puddings.

The existential nightmare which is the pudding is completely inescapable, and intrinsic to the human condition.

It's fucking puddings all the way down.

Bastards!!

You are loved and help is available.

LOL, aww, that's sweet.

Honestly, it's not a cry for help or expression of despair.

People can be, and frequently are, good people. But in the aggregate, I don't ascribe "goodness" to humans -- especially when nobody is looking.

As a species we're capable of a lot of good. But we're also capable of a lot of other stuff.

No Bruce Lee here, just a man who has handled himself in various situations both CONUS and overseas. If your life is that sad, why don't you do something with it.

Look, if you want to flap your gums and wave around your penis, do it elsewhere.

Maybe on a chat room with your buddies while you're playing Xbox.

Mostly you sound like a total wanker.

So is the bravado of internet nerds.

And differentiating between the humor and the actual fool who says "yo dawg, if that was me I'd be all gangster and shit and and be up in his grill and ... aw. mom, I'll take out the garbage later" ... well, not my job.

So basically you'd be streaming your criminal activity on YouTube all the time? Because that would be stupid.

Or you'd bust our your super ninja skills and enable the streaming as the police were knocking on your door with a carefully placed deadman switch? Why not just go all Bruce Lee on them and beat them up and take their guns?

Because, honestly, when I hear Slashdot people saying all of the tough shit they'd be doing in that situation I just really have to laugh -- seriously, stop fronting ... nobody believes you're a thug or a criminal mastermind. It's lame.

A bunch of pasty nerds talking tough on the internet who would really just pee their pants and cry like little girls.

And, yes, I'm not claiming to be any different.

You seem to be under the illusion that people in general act on a moral, principled basis in all (or even most) aspects of life.

You are sadly mistaken and delusional if you think that.

You haven't spent nearly enough time around people if you are expecting moral condemnation from most movie goers.

People are, not nearly as deep down as we'd like to think, complete fucking barbarians. And don't ever forget it.

Most people don't commit crimes for fear of punishment, not because they morally object. On balance, the human race is far more amoral than people like to believe.

And anything which relies on the inherent goodness of humans is probably useless. Because humans aren't inherently good.

Some of of can tell the difference between fiction and reality. They get away with lots of things in movies that are not acceptable in real life.

And you can rest assured, the shit they get away with in movies they wouldn't in real life ... have happened in real life. Many many many times. In many many different places.

Police have been muscling up suspects as long as there have been police.

That "fiction" you're talking about is straight out of real life. If anything, the "fiction" is probably tamer than some of the shit which has been done in real life.

If you think this is the first time cops have threatened a suspect (or possibly even done so), you are hopelessly naive.