Sweden has some pretty hardcore taxes for the rich. Don't get me wrong, he's still a very monied guy (he made plenty before the sale as well) but it isn't like he got to keep all the cash. Sweden doubtless took their cut.

Episode 545: The Blue Pallet

If you don't listen to Planet Money, you should.

I have no "proof" same as any other "proof" out there. The world is a constantly shifting equilibrium, and I have no idea where the attractor may lie.

But I see a few things that were never possible before.

1) Satiety. What do we really NEED now. We need food, clothing, shelter. Other revolutions happened when a large part of the populace was wanting something but costs were too high for food or clothing, etc. We're now in a time of, for a lot of people, food surplus. Where's the demand coming from? Yeah, we can invent new tech, but how many TVs do you really need? Can that drive growth? I don't have the equations, but we're already seeing this in the US, Europe, and China to some extent. We're demand constrained, from both lack of rapidly growing need, and lack of wages to finance that need. Yes, i'm speaking somewhat USAcentric here (i know there is lack of food security elsewhere) but for good or bad, the American consumer economy is the gravity that all the other economic planets align around.

2) Information networks allow centralization as never before possible. Do you think Jeff Bezos is going to walk into your cafe? No, he lives in Washington. You ship money to him on a regular basis, but he makes damn sure he doesn't ship any back to you or your region. It's not just globalization, but a general shipping of resources to places that don't need to ship resources back, either to foreign shores or even local centrally located economies. This trend is not going to end any time soon.

3) Speed. The other revolutions took place over the course of decades, our current one is happening much faster. A contrived example, what if you spent money on becoming a MySpace consultant? You'd be making close to zero cash now. The ability for jobs to disappear seems (IMHO) faster than what humans can do, in the average sense, to learn skills for new ones.

I know I'm no expert, and not claiming to be, but it's something we need to think about. This isn't even a last year thing - our economy has been slowing for years. It was masked by two events, the first being wives working outside of the home bringing in more household cash. The second, is people using home equity as a credit card, using debt to mask lack of wage increases, and that contributed to a near global economic meltdown. Now that the Home Equity Line of Credit is gone, purchasing power growth is now reverting to wage growth and we're screwed.

Nope.

"Real" Unemployment rate is whatever you measure, as long as you're consistent. We can call this "real" one U4 (currently around 6%), or the one you seem to like U6 which has dropped significantly since your reference. Both are better when Obama took office, when the nation was shedding jobs like crazy. Both are better overall even though the government has shed jobs since Obama took office (yes the government is smaller under Obama, you don't hear about that much). To get a better unemployment number, the private sector needs to grow to offset the losses in the public sector, and still some more. Obama's not doing a horrible job.

Obama did have a decent hand in lowering unemployment. It's just not enough. Even early on in the recession people told him to spend more, and he knew he couldn't get a real spending bill past Congress (and we're still at historically low interest rates on bonds, money is cheap! Build infrastructure, baby!). But, instead of saying "hey we need more, but this is all those suckers will give us" he was very "this should be enough". He never recovered from that. It truly is his mistake, and it cost him much in both sets of midterms.

There is a narrative that Democrats are lousy on the economy, when the economy tends to do better with Democratic Presidents.

As far as how many he should have added, hmm, that's a good question. Comparing to the 60's - hmmmmmm. We had a postwar dividend, in both pent up consumer demand, and baby boomers becoming new consumption targets. We didn't have globalization then. Japan and Germany were still recovering from the war. China wasn't even on the map economically. No Internet, no offshoring, no robots. It would be an interesting discussion on whether we could *ever* get back to that kind of increase. I have kids, I wish we could. But can they ever win a job from Watson?

So, to squeeze all the memory in 16 bits of address line, certain areas were overlays. In particular, there was an overlay of video memory that overlapped app memory space. How did they work this out? Once your program was running and you mapped the additional memory in, any writes from user code went to the memory (no self modifying code) and any reads came from the video rasterizer.

From the perspective of your program, write only memory.

I was born a white guy in a neighborhood that was rapidly changing to Mexican. By the time I was a teenager, the transformation was pretty complete, and I was the only caucasian in my social group. I was the odd one out; since i didn't speak Spanish. I was liked and accepted in these groups, no big thing. I did stick out, mostly for language reasons. For a year I went to a predominately black school, again the odd one out. No issues there. But I did stick out. You can be unique and regarded as such, and still be respected and not prejudiced against.

My wife is Taiwanese. When I first started going to visit her family in TW about a decade ago (when we were dating) I tended to be the only caucasian I'd see in a day. If I saw another adoa (Taiwanese for white guy, non-derrogotory) we'd kind of smile. And people of color (black, asian Indian, arabic) etc. tended to be a once a week sighting. Again, nothing bad, more "you're not from around dese parts, is ya?"

I think a "majority" person becoming a minority in a situation is a good thing. It helps you think from the others point of view. Humans are tribal. We group and band for various reasons. I remember hearing about a school with identical school uniforms, where the students formed cliques on how they rolled up their socks. They just searched and found another way to be tribal. I don't think ignoring the fact that people cluster is a good thing. I think having people be able to step out of their cluster every once in a while and make sure you respect all the other clusters of people is pretty good.

As far as black and white, well, welcome to America. Black and white here have a history unlike any other. The only other group close would be Native American, and we pretty much marginalized them so much they're not even part of every day discourse. A good path to the world you want - and I want - where prejudices both large and subtle don't exist is through understanding. I'm not sure that decrying an experiment where you get to see the other side hurts understanding.

C64 Cassette tape (Datasette I think was the name) here.

One of the best parts - the reader/writer head tended to be off alignment, so there were times you couldn't even share cassettes with your friends - though I was the only one with a Commodore computer anyway (the friends in my pay grade had no comp, my rich friends had Apple II series).

And my first computer had 2KB of RAM, I'm typing this from a 12Gb Desktop.

One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.

Obviously you didn't read it either.

Jews have never fought wars to convert a populace. All the wars in Deuteronomy are over revenge or simply territory. Such was life in the ANE. The ancient Jews were nomads who wanted to settle. Whether an escape from Egypt ever happened or not is irrelevant.

Can we stick to "News for nerds", please?

You discover Apple software sucks way less on OS-X. The fanboys will tell you this is evidence of how much better OS-X is, of course, but the real reason is Apple doesn't do a good job on their ports. They really half-ass their Windows ports so they end up not being good software. It is possibly something to try and make OS-X look better but more likely simply laziness and a lack of good Windows developers.

There's a big difference between not going out of your way to support something and going out of your way to prevent it. Windows doesn't have a native POSIX interface (it used to have a basic one) but you can add one if you like. It can be done higher level via something like Cygwin, or it can be done directly in the executive just like the Win32/64 APIs. There is nothing stopping you from adding it, they don't care.

Same deal with DirectX and OpenGL. A Windows GPU driver has to provide DirectX support. It is just part of the WDDM driver. Windows provides no OpenGL acceleration, and no software emulation. However you can provide your own OpenGL driver if you wish, and Intel, nVidia, and AMD all elect to do so. Windows does nothing to stop this and they work great (if the company writes a good driver). Indeed you could develop your own graphic API and implement that, if you wished.

There's a big difference between saying "We aren't going to do any work to support your stuff," and saying "We are going to work to make sure your stuff can't be supported."

I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.

I'll go one better, and not have my infotainment system hooked up to anything in the motortrain. That's just scary.

Ford has their own engine control computer, They're up to EEC-VII now, and they've ben running on PowerPC since the first 40x series came out in the mid 90's.

I have a non-logical like for Fords, even during the dark days, though the only Ford I had was an Escort EXP. GT40/GT350H halo effect maybe.

It always pained me for Ford to have such great quality numbers on build, maintenance, etc, then get pounded into sand by the fact that SYNC sucked donkey balls so hard. It seemed so tail-wag-the-dog. A $30000 car scuttled by lousy software. I'm so glad it's gone.

And WinCE6 + Flash? Really? Did they talk to any engineers at all about how that was going to crash and burn?