You are exactly right. There is, most cogently, a theory that evolution of the mind moves knowledge and culture forward like this. My favorite example of this is taken from Joseph Campbell, who, admittedly, took some inspiration from Carl Jung. Campbell pointed to the rise of the Romantic tradition in Europe (troubadours, the idea of romantic affection being pre-eminent, love over procreation, etc arising at the same time as similar ideas in Japan without any physical or cultural connection between the societies. Another, more obvious, connection is the amazing rise of similar ideas in Greece (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato in three generations) India, Gautama Buddha and his disciples, China (Confucious and LaoTzu at the same time) . All of this happened in the 600-400BCE range. This confluence is often pooh-poohed based on the possibility of communication between the cultures, not the existence of records of communication.

I have put 27,000 miles on my 2014 Chevy volt, about 5/8s on straight electric, the remainder on gas driven electric. I just changed the oil at 25,000 miles when the car said it still had 20% life in it. I don't rotate tires. I have an account with on-star and myChevy that tracks the parts that need maintenance through on-star and in vehicle diagnostics (it emails me if a tire is low) and sends a monthly report with service suggestions. So far, there have been no suggestions for service. I love that little car and my mileage is running about 80 mpg overall, GM/Chevy sells and services, but it will be out of warrentee before any service is needed, so I will take it to my local mechanic who is thirsting for a chance to work on one and learn them. He sees the future.
Basically the problem is change. Nobody who has gone through the roller coaster of the last thirty years in auto sales, maintenance and manufacturing looks at change positively. Who could blame them. They need to be sat down with the government and presented with a plan, supported by the government, that will give them the support to manage this change and protexct them and consumers as well as moving our process into the future.
Fta effin' chance you say? I agree, but it is what is needed.

Everyone else? Like all hardware is OSX certified? Try putting any old HDD or SSD into a macbook and see how that works.

Agreed. I am wondering if the POTUS also supported this to slam the Russians? That was my initial reading of the price drop: Obama said we will hit your economy where it hurts and then it happens. Sounds reasonable to me anyway.

You don't understand the numbers, or China: They have spent the money, yes. 1/3 went to panel production mostly for overseas sales. 1/3 went to infrastructure: building production plants, developing the raw materials contracts with governments like Mongolia, Russia and the 'Stans and 1/3 goes to corruption, or what we would call corruption. The vice-president of every company and org in China is a CCCP member who must be given a gift to sign off on anything. Their actual role in the company is control of the funds, incoming and outgoing, so you can see how that all works.

The fundamentalism of the current version of Islam is the source of the theology/philosophy. It is a philosophy that supports and encourages jihadism as a solution to the problems of their political structures: mostly feudal dictatorships. The single point of beginning sometimes pointed to is the rise in power of AlWahaba and so-called Wahabism in the early 1900s. It was this brand of Sunni fundamentalism that, teamed with the political support of AbdulAziz's Saud family that led to the idea that :
1) all infidels must die to purify the world
2) non-Sunni Muslims are equally infidels
3) if you do not support the political group that is being supported by whoever is talking at that moment, you are an infidel even if you claim to be a Sunni. For these reasons, the young blogger busted for anti-government writing in Saudi Arabia is getting 1000 lashes over the next 20 weeks as an infidel and for attacking religion.
So it is not just religious, it is also political and .... well, obviously fucked up.

Note, I have a number of students from the Middle East. They consider this all to be correct, and normal, logical and proper. Until they can grow past this view of the world (basically a pre-Renaissance world view) they are going to be kept in the dark ages. They can't see that they are the victims, they think that god loves them because they accept this. They need a voice of reason based on compassion and love. Frankly, it seems far off at the moment, but the sadness of the blinders they wear (stitched onto their minds) is overwhelming. In every other aspect of their world they are kind, generous, warm and loving people, but get near the theology and they turn off their minds and hearts.

As usual, everybody gets sucked into the BIG fail issue of cost/time: value as a monetary function. The value of higher education is not only monetary ( I am not pretending that money is not a factor, just that only fools make it the primary factor). Think of it from these perspectives:
1) If you have a job with 4 weeks of vacation time (with holidays) each year you are commited to 48X40=1920 hours of your life at your job. This is slightly less than 1/3 of your life. If you are doing this just for the money then you are either creating a human who is an ATM robot (as in a cash machine for your "loved ones") or is miserable and getting ground into the dust. Do something that you want to go to work on every day, no matter the money.
2) back in the day, I was taught that the reasion to study history AND math AND science AND literature AND etc is to learn the different modes of thought, understanding and reasoning. That an education gave the student multiple ways to interact with information, and that this gave the student a depth of insight that was the definition of an educated person. Certainly my education, and of the educated people I know succeeded at this at least partially.
3) my education gave me opportunities that were life enhancing and changing: when I graduated high school I had other things to do than go to university. I started businesses, started a family, lived a hard, fast life of the semi-successful businesssman, father, familyman, community person. In my 40s, I gave all that up and went to university (Beginning with a year at community college, just sayin') and got a BA. That degree let me do what I had wanted to do for twenty years: go abroad and work overseas. It was fantastic, just what I wanted. While there I found that a Masters degree would give me more opportunities to do more of what I wanted to do, so I did that. I had wanted to work overseas for 20 years but didn't have the educational foundation to do it, and now I do.

Education helps you grow, to do what you really want to do and to live the way you really want to: forget the money, that is for chumps and fools who think it can buy happiness or security.+

OK, then explain why Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France and Spain no longer are at replacement birthrate?
Explain why the US is only there because of immigrant populations.
The Chinese one child policy was the result of overpopulation destroying their economy through the agricultural demand on too many children. The resulting reduction of population has helped to feed the economy and the growth of an educated populace. You are just plain wrong and probably misunderstand evolution.

I deliberately didn't include Russia, which is just the saddest example of low replacement rate (less than 2, maybe near 1.5 children per couple now) because the problems are social: abortion is the preferred birth control method and the effect of cheap Vodka on the death rate and health problems with FAS babies and unhealthy parents. It is really bad right now.

Well, it used to be much harder to get and keep a license, the one notable exception being drunk driving. When I took my first road test (1970) I failed because the system was designed to fail almost everybody. My ex-partner failed 3 times (should have been permanent, but that is a different rant). The tester deliberately set me up to fail and I did: Pull up to stop sign at a "T" intersection onto a 4 lane highway. "Turn left please." I turn left, as I'm turning he says "at the next light [one block up the road] turn left again" I turn into the left hand lane and then prepare to turn left again. On returning to the parking lot he explained why I failed because of that situation. "When you turn onto a four lane rooad you must turn into the far right-hand lane until you can pick up speed to merge into the left turn lane." That was the rule, the law, the test.

Nowadays, they don't even test for parallel parking ability, much less rules of the road.

What is the logical flaw called when you use data that relates to only one situation (like speed limits for limited access highways) to define a problem that has a much wider range (like speed limits for all roads)?
That is the situation I see here. While I might want to disagree with you about setting speed limits based on the "avaerage driver" it is because I live in Florida where we have a significant number of aged drivers who have no skills or abilities for driving on a high-speed roadway of any type, but they are allowed and expected to. Putting them on I-95 or I-75 is just asking for accidents.

Oh, and I just want to add that I hate the American focus on driving and on getting places faster. I try to travel by public transport and to use that time to my advantyage rather than waste hours of my day driving. I really don't care how fast I can go, and when I occasionally drive to my daughters house on the other side of the state I take state roads that max at 60mph rather than the I-75 route at 70mph. But now I mostly just take the train, its easier and I can read or plan lessons while I ride.

"That means they are set were the speed most people feel comfortable driving is faster than the posted limit - in other words in places where the limit is wrong, as on average drivers pick a reasonable speed"

I disagree. I live on a street that is entirely residential, in a district that is mostly residential, but has a highway feeder entrance ramp nearby. Two roads, mine and the one parallel get not only a disproportionate amount of traffic, but higher speed traffic than other streets in our area. Yes, there are larger roads bracketing the area that were designed to take the traffic and allow a higher speed, but they have traffic lights. So, we get the "greedy, speedy" types that must rush through our street, killing dogs and cats, honking at kids and adults on bikes, and breaking the speed limit in a residential area. We need a speed camera(s) to stop this traffic.

Or.... here is a (libertarian) solution. When I was a kid in the early suburbs, there was a nacent suburb being built on the hill beyond our house. The only way in to the suburb was past our house. Every afternoon, just after my dad got home from work, a resident from up the hill came flying over the rise before our house and dropped into a lower gear as he went down to the bridge over a little creek at the bottom before the hill and then up the hill to the burb. Dad flagged him down one day and asked him, in the name of the pets and children in our set of houses, to slow down and quite driving like an asshat. He didn't . So, a week or so later, dad came home and grabbed a fencepost from the pile beside the driveway and stood by the side of the road. I watched and listened as the sportscar came barrelling down the road and over the rise dad dropped the fencepost into the road and stepped back behind a tree out of sight. The car hit the fencepost, jumped up, out of control landed sliding into the ditch and rolled into the empty lot across the street. Dad grabbed the post, sauntered over to the pile and threw it back on it and went into the house without even a glance at the sportscar or its driver. Problem solved.

mmmmmm, i disagree, but that doesn't necessarily make me right. We buy 1 new phone every 2 or three years for the whole family. This last time, my wife got a Nexus 5, I got her Samsung Infuse (a G2 clone for ATT) and my son got my old Sony Ericcsen m608i which is still an awesome phone ( I bought it in 2007). Tablets, I bought one, loved it (a WeTab) but it had one too many sudden decceleration events and had to be retired. No desire to replace it at all. My work gave me a Nexus 7 and I gave it back, the Samsung phone does all I need.

The one thing we doo all use is real e-ink ebook readers. I buy about 1 a year of those and we all use them all the time. While we do, occasionally, read paper books, e-ink is so wonderful for reading, especially in bed or a chair, that I only read paper when I have a table to rest it on nowadays. So, for me, I think that you aren't telling about our patterns.

I am cautious about this because when you describe Americans, who buy cheap Apple trash that is broken or outmoded on a regular and predetermined schedule then you are correct. The number of people who I see in my office who can't wait to dump their old, slow, broken iTrash is insane, especially bercause they are lusting for new (soon to be) slow, broken iTrash. What is up with that? Isn't that the definition of insanity all over again?

It's not European, It's Asian.

Well, only true douchebags who think they are cool because the dial goes up to six (that's BIGGER than five!) hold it up to their head. Garden grade douchbags use it with a bluetooth earset that makes them look douchiest of all while not actually achieving the heighth of douchebaggery that comes from holding it to their head. The very first phablet, IMHO, was the Dell 7 back in 2009 or 10. I met a guy in a tech mall in China using one as a phablet with an earset. I liked the basic idea, but it took me a few months to find a non-douchebag headset with earplugs and a bluetooth clip-on mikewhich I am sure you agree is by far less douchebaggy. By then I was out of interest and didn't want anything but a WeTab for a tablet.

Swamp Baptists think of it as his birthday, other Baptists and Methodists as well, certainly the lay people of most christian groups do.

Oh and the M,M,L&J party idea is kind of weak since they weren't alive when Jesus was, and most of them weren't alive when the others were, and didn't know each other except by reading copies of the prior writers. John died the latest, almost 300AD when the council of Nicea chose the accepted gospels and letters and acts that make up the new testament as well as deciding what they would accept in the OT.

There is plenty of knowledge about all this, but that doesn't mean that everyone shares that knowledge or wants to know these things since they don't agree with what they learned in Sunday School as Toddlers which is when their religious beliefs were cast in stone.