Skilled trades are NOT subject to automation in most cases. But neither are STEM careers..

Farming was the primary motivation for me into a STEM career. Getting up at 3 AM to milk the cows then spending all day in the fields picking up hay only to return to the barn at 5 PM to milk again is a great way to motivate the lazy. I also got a fair amount of experience in mechanics, building and raising cattle so a skilled trade (mechanic, various building trades etc) wouldn't have been a problem, I just decided I liked Air Conditioning better than the great outdoors.

NOW they tell me that I should have been a welder? Um.. No, don't figure it's a good idea to spend my life in cramped spaces, berating heaven knows what welding something. Go ahead and get the engineering degree if you have the aptitude for math and science, but you might want to have a skilled trade or two up your sleeve.

Seriously, STEM isn't dead folks.. It will never be dead. But it's not a seller's market anymore in the engineering world. Right now it's a buyer's market because there are a bunch of us old geezers with decades of experience filing up the ranks, all the young whipper-snappers with the ink still drying on their bachelors degree don't have many jobs to choose from. But give it 5 years, maybe a decade and a lot of the engineering talent will be retiring, aging out or dying off. THEN your degree with 5 years of low level experience will be worth something..

Found the problem... Tell them to MOVE. NY is a pretty bad place for business and will be so for a long time. I hear North Dakota is booming, although you might have to drive a truck or something in the Oil Fields.

Getting better over the last few weeks... Still has issues during peak usage though.

(sarc on)

Only an apple user would consider their phone a fashion accessory... How many 5c's you got there? One of each color so you can match any outfit? Cool there metro man.

(sarc off)

Look, go ahead and buy the phone that floats your boat as long as you can afford it... Me? I'll stick with my 3 year old android, not because I cannot afford a new one, but because I like not paying for a new one and I have other things I'd rather do with the money.

But how this whole discussion has anything to do with the original Tesla vrs Nissan article is beyond me..

Taxes on fuel mostly, which are paid by the users of said roads when they fill up their cars to drive on the roads.. Some are supported by tolls around here too. Or didn't you realize that the government did that? In Kansas I paid for my share of the road in front of my house too though "special taxes". The city/county would pay for the infrastructure up front then literally bill the lot owners for costs and interest over 10 or 15 years. Seemed fair to me. It also seems that, for the most part, roads are paid for by taxes on fuel, cars, registration fees etc, which are paid for by the users of the roads.

Mass transit hardly ever is fully supported by its users. Around here a SALES TAX that supports it and EVERYBODY pays the sales tax. So, even though I don't use or benefit from Mass transit (mainly because it doesn't get anywhere near my house OR my place of employment) I'm still paying the sales taxes that support it. Not that I'm complaining, but I'm making a point that Mass transit is NOT self supporting and could never survive on the fares it collected from those who use it.

Ever heard about taxes on FUEL and TOLL booths? Some roads/bridges pay for themselves though taxes collected by the users of same. Mass transit rarely does this (if it ever does.)

And in some cases, much, much cooler than that Apple...

But hey, I didn't choose the example, but was responding to another's illustration.

If the bus/train goes when I where I want and when I want, I'll take it. Problem is that they hardly ever go where I want to go, when I want to go. Further, my experience is not unique, but more common. You can make a financial argument (parking, tolls etc) and that might be worth it to some.

Be careful with systems like BART though... They usually are not self supporting but highly dependent on revenue from government or taxes. Which generally explains why public transit is pretty limited. It simply doesn't make sense financially..

I'm having unpleasant dreams about wheelbarrows full of German cash being used to buy anything and everything one could find, only to discover the wheelbarrow was stolen while you where in the store..

beep, beep, beep..... BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.... BEEP, BEEP, BEEP .... Can you hit the snooze button please?

They are worlds better than the Cable company.... I used to be down for days with the cable provider because somebody on my block insisted on handing out DHCP addresses for some reason. Their tech support guys couldn't seem to figure out who it was. I finally got tired of them and jumped on FiOS when it first came out.

My connection has been rock solid since. I've had maybe 3 outages that where not my fault in 8 years, and two of those where because of the cheap router the provided was too unstable. I just went and got my own hardware and ditched that horrible Actiontec junk.

However, they are the absolute most expensive for the bandwidth you get. They filter/firewall residential DHCP service to keep you from running servers (http, https, ftp etc) but they don't tell you this directly. Also, they have pretty crappy traffic management so even though I pay for 25/25Mbps connection, I can pretty much count on only getting that when speed checking on their servers. Any real traffic can never approach that, even in aggregate.

So I don't recommend Verizon very highly either. Even if it is the lesser of the various evils available to me.

I know what you mean... I think some miss the forest for the twigs too. Even running THOR, the NSA can watch what you do if they are well enough connected (and running THOR might actually make that more likely.) Packets leaving your network enter the wild wild west and are subject to inspection, monitoring and alteration by a great number of folks that you could never detect much less control. Why then are we up in arms about minor issues with our routers/firewalls? My guess is because it's about the only think we can actually do something about..

I will take your point... But The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is part of the Treasury Department is it not? And a Federal Reserve bank needs to be ready to cough up the physical cash should an account holder demand to make a withdraw.

On that point you are correct, but the physical currency is being expanded. What IS relevant, is the expansion of the total money supply and the artificial lowering of interest rates caused by QE. Not all money is physical these days, much is electronic and only backed by physical currency when it hits the streets in your hands. IMHO Inflation will be the result of QE as it has increased the money supply, both physical and electronic. There is no way to avoid it because we have added more to the currency supply than to our GDP growth.

BTW, I'm not an advocate of buying gold as there are better things to invest in beyond something you cannot legally hold in your hand (unless it's in coin form) and have to pay somebody buy and store. Seems stupid to invest in something like that.

I hear you, but over the last few weeks it seems to be getting a lot better, at least for me. Buffering has not completely stopped, but it went from every 10 seconds down to less than once every 50 min show. Didn't I hear that Netflix agreed to pay Verizon for better connectivity?