Lunar New Year, you insensitive clod! It's celebrated by more cultures than the Chinese, after all.

Agreed. DVD stores are a thing of the past; time to move on to value-add. Gourmet popcorn, home viewing hardware, private viewing rooms, all that sort of stuff.

If you're a religious person, would religious colleagues push their opinions on you?

Agreed with you on the other point, but one caveat: you're at work to work, not to preach. At some point, common courtesy indicates that a subject be dropped. Otherwise it's disruptive to everyone.

I'm really curious about how they solved the last mile problem. I've thought about starting a non-profit ISP in Canada, but the real questions is how to avoid paying Bell their pound of flesh. Until that problem is solved and you've got ISP-agnostic fibre being laid, it means that you're charging what Bell is charging.

Here in Montreal, we don't even have cell phone signal in the vast majority of the subway network. Hell, I'm still waiting for bathrooms and disabled access, let alone such 'luxuries' as wifi.

Really? I wonder why they'd bother. I had an unlimited data plan on my smartphone, and as far as I know, pretty much everyone else did too, and at least with KTF, I had tethering.

Maybe I'm just a cold, cynical bastard, but when I see booth babes, I don't feel positive associations. In fact, I immediately get suspicious - if their product needs booth babes to drive traffic, how good can it be intrinsically?

Hell, I don't even know what Cinnamon even is. I keep going back to the website, but it doesn't ever explicitly tell you. I think it's a desktop environment?

I'm genuinely curious. Have other countries really, truly explicitly asked the US to militarily intervene in the sovereign affairs of other nations? I often find myself a bit out of my depth with US/international relations, so I'd be much obliged if you could provide a link or two.

Well, I suppose you'd have to check countries where this has already occurred, such as in South Korea. In South Korea, the smartphones are subsidized, but you can still change carrier. It just so happens that when you do, the new carrier simply buys the phone contract from the old carrier, and makes a new contract with the client for the phone.

That's absolutely correct, but the point is the continuity in the self-propagating pattern. The person I am today is distinct, both in terms of mental state and composition, from the person I was ten years ago, but it's not like we think of ourselves as the murderers of our previous iterations.

I am not comfortable with the concept of losing the continuity in my self-propagating pattern. I've come to enjoy it. :)

Curiously enough, this didn't stop South Korean telecom companies. When I was living there, I was able to move my phone from company to company without a problem, even with a smartphone plus subsidy. The only limit was that I could only move my phone sixty after signing the initial contract.

I assume that the new company simply bought the phone contract from the old company outright, and simply continued on the same terms with the client.

There was a story about this involving some sort of super AI called Manna. It ended up essentially destroying the economy, I believe, and relegating everyone below the highest classes to concentration camps for poor people.

I don't know that their solution was ideal, but I do suspect that a post-scarce economy is what we need to investigate.

While I agree with your overall point, I disagree with the notion that exposing children to a single strong accent (that is, a strong accent differing from the one used in their environment) could affect their speech patterns. My experiences suggest that it is the overall environment that determines language development, and not a single source of linguistic information. For example, my parents speak English with very heavy accents, and I studied at a French immersion high school. Yet, my English is still excellent and adheres to the Canadian standard, even after four years spent abroad.

Similarly, my ESL students speak rather... less... like me than I would prefer.

Your question is actually fairly complex, and the answer depends on which ideological lens you favour.

The right wing people would likely submit that the richer classes will invest or otherwise use their money, and thus employ many other people, in the so-called 'trickle down effect'. I don't think this actually works very well in practise, but in theory, that's the idea.

The left wing people, on the other hand, might say that your hypothesis is entirely correct: as the people at the top begin to concentrate and accumulate wealth, the nation as a whole becomes impoverished, much like England in the late 1800s. I tend to agree with the left wing people; I think that this situation in the US is actually very worrisome and almost entirely due to excessive hoarding of wealth by higher classes.

The actual answer is probably somewhere between the two, though I favour an answer that's a little closer to the left wing response. No doubt, there are wealthy people who invest sensibly to create jobs, especially entrepreneurs and business owners, but I also suspect that a lot of wealthy people are only stock holders, and I'm not sure how trading stock (after the IPO) is directly beneficial to the economy.