Unless the drone operator is trying to fly kamikaze drones into a landing aircraft's engines....

The first two lines of your observations point out that women are likely to:
-work less overtime
-work fewer weekends
-drop out of the labor force due to pregnancy (diminishing the ROI of education/corporate training investments)

Let's assume that all those points are backed up by statistics.
Then in your next line you seem to criticize managers for displaying a preference towards young single male employees.

But isn't that an entirely rational decision on management's part, to maximize the expected utility it derives from its employees? Assuming all other credentials between a male and female are equal, if the stats backup the assertion that the female employee, say over a timeframe of 5 or 10 years, will deliver fewer hours of productivity compared to the young single male, how can you expect management to take such a risk?

The constant agenda we see is "management styles need to change to accommodate women". Are there any studies or stats demonstrating a net productivity gain from doing so, and what kind of metrics did they use?

I think you make a good point about how women don't respond to the sorts of management techniques that maybe work well on men. But men who find an institution's practices unsatisfactory (whatever that institution is, a workplace, a religion, etc.) often tend to break out on their own, and craft a new organization in their image. Women seem more inclined to complain about the existing institution until it is changed to accommodate them.

So why is it wrong to tell women "Your entire approach to social problem-solving is neither valued nor tolerated in this environment. If you have a issue with that....feel free to go forge your own destiny elsewhere" ? If I said that to a male employee no one would bat an eye. But if I say it to a female employee I'm "poorly emotionally developed"?

I haven't used Mandarin since I studied it for two years....5 years ago. However, I've been living in Japan for 3+ years now, and I find Japanese *FAR* worse to learn than Mandarin. Yes, the katakana/hiragana makes reading easier, and yes the range of phonetics is simple for a Westerner. However.... the grammar is just totally bonkers IMO. Chinese and English are at least both Subject-Verb-Object languages, and Mandarin's lack of verb conjugation is a godsend. You can build simplistic English sentences in your mind and translate them piece-by-piece (like shifting data into a memory buffer and multiplexing it ....with Mandarin). The result will usually be "close enough". You can't do this with Japanese. I think the best Asian language solution would employ the Korean alphabet, Japanese phonetics, and Mandarin grammar. Too bad they all hate each other and would never agree to it. :-/

"Yes yes prices may go up, but as minimum wage advocates say, if you have to pay people more, they have more to spend." Or companies would increase their R&D/capital spending on robotics/automation, and make even more aggressive moves to eliminate their minimum wage positions than they are already doing..... Population growth + automation will eventually make the economic model of "everyone must work to earn their own way" unnecessary and obsolete. I think we are fast approaching the point where we need to essentially put 3-4 billion people on welfare, with the other 3 billion workers we actually need to support civilization collecting upper-middle class incomes. Then the existing crony-capitalists can stay as our feudal overlords, using some of their billions for something other than driving up the prices of NY real estate and rare Ferraris.

Except it won't work in space. Per TFS, this device superheats air particles to push the object in the opposite direction. If your object is in the vacuum of space and therefore has no neighboring air to superheat, it's kinda useless....

1. Run a firing pin, trigger spring, or any other small part through a 3D scanner. 2. Send the scans to a Chinese fabricator with good Quality Control (they do exist). 3. Order 100,000 of everything. That should keep them supplied for the foreseeable future and still cost less than adopting a more modern (and potentially less reliable) weapon. Or just switch to the equally old Mosin Nagant. Should be plenty of those lying around with internal parts to cannibalize for decades.

I run Debian Jessie w/ XFCE on my laptop in place of Kali, itself Debian-based. Largely because Kali updates some of the tools I want to use (primarily GNURadio) too slowly for my tastes.

I agree. In fact, it was probably the Xeelee. http://xeelee.wikia.com/wiki/X...

Interesting observation on the "IBM Bureacracy era" metastasizing across government agencies. I've had similar thoughts about the inefficiencies inherent in the Department of Defense. Procedures were introduced in the mid-1940's to manage a globe-spanning total war effort coordinating tens of millions of men. The war went away, the gigantic military (partially) went away.....but the bureaucracy didn't. And now, in the 21st century, it's a hindrance rather than a help.

It's no longer "news" to find that a private sector company has a leaner, less bureaucratic environment and workflow than a Federal government agency.

It's interesting that you consider US institutions outmoded and inefficient. I'm an American living in Japan and that's how I look at *Japanese* bureaucracy. Sure some things are semi-easy (I can walk/drive to any convenience store to pay my electric and gas bills in cash), but almost anything involving interaction with the local government is insanely Byzantine, paperwork-intensive, and a massively inefficient time-waster.

There are a *LOT* of other factors contributing to the US's superpower status pre-Reagan or Clinton. Things like:
1. massive natural resource endowment (particularly land area, educated population, and cheap energy reserves)
2. being the only large industrialized nation not bombed into oblivion post-1945.

to name just a few. Now we are witnessing a regression to the mean as some of these key points (education, cheap domestic energy, and unique industrialization) are challenged by the same globalization principles that we put in place. The fact that our government bureaucracy at all levels is a bloated and inefficient mess only serves to retard any attempts to correct our deficiencies and maintain our position.

Every time a new 3D printer is announced, the first thing I check on the specifications list is the bed size. This one is bigger than most, but still too small. It can print items 12"x6"x6"....perhaps enough for visual accessories like center console trim, mirrors, and hood vents, but you can't do door panels, or major body parts like the bumper.....let alone a carbon monocoque chassis. So tone down the delusions of printing a Lamborghini on your desktop for now. I can think of some non-automotive uses though: casings for electronics, and custom firearms.