He also knows that for larger projects to fulfill promises made to investors, he must keep to schedule. To keep on schedule, he needs a reliable source of skilled labor. If the state is viewed as a craphole, workers with families will not lay down roots, and his best employees with flee when offered a few pennies more somewhere else.

What is going to happen next is that Oklahoma will spend money on roads that the oil industry uses and services that will make the state a palatable place for oil workers with families to live, thereby creating a reliable supply of skilled employees. New drilling projects become more reliably on time and on budget, thereby reducing the effective risk.

The competent oil men whether the 5 year projects overrun budget and take 7 years to complete, because deliveries are always late and their best employees have fled to Canada. The tax being discussed is a rounding error, in context.

Only in the rich world of today where we confound intelligence with university educations, thereby delaying children during a span of high fertility. That is surely a recent trend. Intelligence correlates with general health, especially in a more rough and tumble world of uncertain nutrition. Above average intelligence is a wonderful positive indicator for mate selection.

Slightly more livebirths are male than female. So it is possible that the average is greater than 1. And then there is, um, China and India to skew the averages, unfortunately.

A big part of the problem is we are hooked on viewing nuclear power as a space aged ego gratifying source of electricity, just like Captain Nemo had. There are probably lots of good uses of a cylinder that gets dropped into a concrete sleeve in the ground providing simple very hot water.

Re #2: People do die from complicated and badly marked construction zones from human error. Happens all the time. So the computer does not have to be 100% to be vastly better than a human. Having the humility to slow down, instead of the human pride that causes us to drive hard forward in the face of uncertainty, will be a huge advantage to the computer program.

Please mod parent up! (Had mod points to burn just a couple days ago.)

How confusing the inputs of a system is to the computer is something that the program should be easily able to figure out, except in cases where the human drivers are hosed as well.

Yes, you can overtly accept debt when accepting assets, but you cannot take on stealth debt by accepting assets that appear to be free and clear when the estate is closed. That is a blatant violation of due process. If the IRS failed to give reasonable notice to the estate of the intention to attach a lien on assets, the debts are gone. They are creditors. Creditors who do not act in a timely manner when an estate is closing or a corporation is being liquidated are simply SoL.

We should take your data here and apply it to the topic on hand, then. The cultural norms of the time required Muhammad to have many such aristocratic marriages, for the purpose of cementing alliances. In the context of the time, across nearly the entire globe, Muhammad's behavior was not unusual for a man in his position.

There are certain ambiguities, because the competence of the average officer does not seem to gel with the seeming extreme ultra-elite status of Starfleet Academy depicted in some episodes. And part of the problem is the graduating classes seem far too small. It is possible that there are many routes into Starfleet, and the Academy is the fast track towards command positions. The best way to rationalize this may be that Starfleet Academy is like West Point -- not every officer in the US Army went to West Point, but it helps a lot if you want to make the grade of Colonel or General.

With technology, we can preserve a lot of genetic diversity in frozen embryos, eggs, sperm. So there are ways of mitigating the risk of genetic trait loss with a lower population.

It is a little more complicated than that because perception within field of view changes with distance. But your idea does suggest some interesting experiments: how/whether variations in stripe width and distance to striped object can affect insect flight patterns.

There will be transaction fees. Because of what jeremyp said. Also, it is only a minscule slice of the people on this planet who can dare touch more than pocket change worth of bitcoin, without the benefits of some kind of insurance. Exchanges will step in and be part of that solution, eventually, once they are stable and respected enough to be backed by real money. So that "large amounts of money anywhere in the world for free" is never going to happen, in any important sense.

Bitcoin and similar have a shot at competing with credit cards. The real question is how much lower the fees be than 3%, once all kinds of overhead are factored in. Thinking in terms of zero costs is just a fantasy. Luckily for the bitcoin aficionados, the bar for success if not nearly so high. They do not have to achieve zero fees in order to be a big success.

At least the Chinese gov't does not have to worry about its people liking to gamble....

There is a degree of guesswork I was making. It could be spiders, or it could be that these shifts look like movement, which might be a bird.

I was just watching a mockingbird in my yard the other day. They hunt for bugs by standing still on ground under bushes, then opening their wings. The underside of their wings has a strong white & dark pattern. Apparently that can trigger an insect flight instinct of some kind, causing the insects to move, revealing their location to the sharp eyes of a very still bird's head.

So this black & white trick is not unique to zebras. Even a hunter can use it against the insects. That suggests the instinct must be quite valuable to the insects themselves.